Local Black Communities Research Articles

Runaways, Refugees, and Race in the Revolutionary Era

Runaways, Refugees, and Race in the Revolutionary Era Kelly Kennington Making Race in the Courtroom: The Legal Construction of Three Races in Early New Orleans. By K ennethR. A slakson. New York: New York University Press, 2014. 261 pages. Cloth, ebook. Tyrannicide: Forging an American Law of Slavery in Revolutionary South Carolina and Massachusetts. By E milyB lanck. Studies in the Legal History of the South. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014. 235 pages. Cloth. A recent wave of new scholarship investigates the intersection of slavery and law in early American history. Although the particular focus on slavery and law emerged in the last decades of the twentieth century, the twenty-first century has produced an embarrassment of rich new works tackling challenging questions in the field: Who makes law? Whose voices mattered to courts, legislators, and the wider legal community? A related set of inquiries asks how enslaved individuals interacted with and experienced the legal system. What kinds of legal cases involved people of African descent, and how did these cases shape broader legal doctrines? 1A multitude of voices contributed to the development of a law of slavery throughout early America, and, as these two books attest, the efforts of enslaved and free people of African descent were essential to the story. In addition to recognizing the importance of enslaved and free people of African descent to legal history, both of these books wrestle with the topic of comity—how courts in one jurisdiction chose to treat the laws of other jurisdictions. For example, how did slave and free states (or nations) [End Page 333]handle legal conflict that arose in their courts? Emily Blanck's work traces how Massachusetts and South Carolina interacted in the years after the Tyrannicideaffair, a dispute over the status of thirty-four enslaved Africans from South Carolina who arrived in Massachusetts after their capture from a British ship, while Kenneth R. Aslakson's book discusses how the migration of refugees from Saint Domingue influenced the role of Louisiana's courts in making racial distinctions. In the era of the American Revolution and the first decades of the United States, concerns over how states and nations worked together and respected each other's laws were central to the larger project of nation building and lawmaking. Blanck's Tyrannicideis a short, readable account of the conflict between South Carolina and Massachusetts over the fate of thirty-four enslaved Africans from the Waccamaw Peninsula of South Carolina. Some of these individuals might have fled their enslavement in late April/early May 1779 and others may have fallen victim to British privateers, but the group ended up on an unnamed British vessel. The details of their initial capture are unknown and, as Blanck argues, might be different for each of the enslaved individuals. The group eventually reached a British ship off the coast of South Carolina, and, after two attacks by privateers, the Massachusetts brig Tyrannicidebrought the enslaved prisoners to Boston Harbor on June 16, 1779. In Blanck's telling, Massachusetts officials "chose to reject the idea that they were property and recognized their humanity and the choices they made" (81) when the captives requested to be sent home to slavery in South Carolina. Blanck explains this decision by suggesting that the enslaved captives were "no doubt exhausted by the perils of life on a privateer" (81). Although twenty of the individuals left shortly after their arrival, the crux of the conflict between the two states concerned the fourteen enslaved people who stayed in Boston for a prolonged period after their owners were delayed in retrieving them. Once this group integrated into the local black community of Boston, they resisted efforts by their former owners to return them to slavery. The resulting conflict set off a flurry of letters between the states' governors and, as Blanck argues, contributed to broader debates over fugitive slaves in the era before the U.S. Constitution's Fugitive Slave Clause. Blanck argues that variations in the states' historical experiences with slavery—rather than fundamental ideological differences—are what caused Massachusetts and South Carolina to oppose each other during the constitutional debates. In four chronological chapters...

Across imperial boundaries: Black social networks across the Iberian South Atlantic, 1760–1810

ABSTRACTRethinking the African Diaspora in the Americas urges scholars to look beyond where Africans came from and where they first disembarked in order to integrate the transimperial dimension. Social networks connecting black communities throughout the Americas constituted an additional feature of the black experience that shaped the political, social, economic, and cultural features of African diasporic communities and the larger societies in which these groups found themselves. Evidence regarding the slaves and freedmen that traveled across the Portuguese and Spanish colonies in South America best illustrates the significance of transimperial networks for local black communities. This article reveals that these transimperial social ties proved essential for black communities in Buenos Aires and Montevideo. This contributes to discussions of “entangled empires” by showing how free and enslaved Africans and their descendants were immersed in transimperial social networks, which to a certain extent they shaped with their actions. This article emphasizes how military actions surrounding the fall of Portuguese Colonia in 1777 shaped the continuous and substantial black social networks across these borderlands and influenced black communities in Buenos Aires and Montevideo.

Does size matter? The benefits and challenges of voluntary sector partnerships in dementia service provision for South Asian communities in England

In response to the need for improved access to dementia services for minority ethnic communities, the Alzheimer’s Society piloted, in 2014, the Information Programme for South Asian Families (IPSAF), an adapted version of its existing course for carers. It delivered this in partnership with local black and minority ethnic community and faith organisations, a new approach for the Alzheimer’s Society. In most cases, the partnerships formed were strong and effective, and have given rise to ongoing plans for joint working that bring benefits to both the local organisations and the Alzheimer’s Society. However, the current realities of UK voluntary and community sector dynamics raise questions of ownership and issues around how to establish genuine partnerships. In this article, we reflect on what the IPSAF experience indicates about the potential for equitable partnerships between small and large organisations, and draw out lessons for building effective, mutually beneficial relationships.

Exploring the Cultural and Social Context of Black Infant Mortality

This community-based participatory research study explores perceptions about infant mortality among Black women in Leon and Gadsden counties of North Florida. It emphasizes engagement and leadership for community organizers and health profession students and partnership building across disciplines. Three focus groups were conducted with Black women (N=20) ages 19 to 68. Participants responded to questions about infant mortality definitions, community impacts, sociocultural causes, prevention strategies, health care access, and racial dynamics. Content analysis with open coding was used to identify key themes. Findings suggest that infant mortality in local Black communities stems from interconnected individual, family, community, health system, and societal factors. These include discrimination, socioeconomic challenges, female burden, stress, cultural taboos, health care access, psychosocial support, educational opportunities, and intergenerational communication. Participants describe community outreach, education, and advocacy as ideal solutions.

Black Power and the Big Green: Dartmouth College and the Black Freedom Movement, 1945-75

Abstract This essay examines the intersection between traditional white American institutions and the need for Black advancement. The case of Dartmouth College from 1945 to 1975 highlights the expanse of the struggle for Black freedom as the burgeoning civil rights and Black Power movements assisted educational institutions with their approach to opportunities for Black students. The socioeconomically elite and geographically isolated colonial college in Hanover, New Hampshire, struggled with attracting Black students and creating resources that helped them acclimate to the starkly white environment. Without the assistance of a local Black community or access to famous activists to act on their behalf, Black students worked together to help the college acknowledge its role in modern society. In doing so, they practiced Black student power, leveraging their status as students in institutions of higher education to act on behalf of the larger Black freedom movement. Dartmouth students benefited from the militant activism of peers at other Ivy institutions that sometimes involved building takeovers and the threat of violence. In addition, they took advantage of the unusual access that they had with the trustees of the college to seize the historical moment by pressuring the institution to evolve with regard to its policies. As a result of their negotiations and vigilance, students at Dartmouth achieved their goals of increased Black enrollment, a Black studies program, and a Black cultural space. Moreover, they showed the nuance and effectiveness of the civil rights and Black Power movements when youth took the lead.

Exhibiting repair in twenty-first-century reinstallations of African collections

This article analyses three twenty-first-century reinstallations of African objects in the United States and South Africa that use gallery space to explicitly address and symbolically redress an institutional history of problematic representations of Africa, and by extension, of blackness. Each project has updated its interpretation to reflect black cultural studies scholarship that emphasizes dynamism within diasporas and attempts to intervene on the ways that museums produce knowledge. While each institution has used its African displays to engage local black communities, this paper inverts the notion that appeals to ‘the community’ are intrinsically anti-authoritative and that objects are necessarily static by suggesting the reparative potential in objects and the paradoxical logic of authenticity that undergirds the museological turn to community. Drawing on gallery observations, interviews and visual analysis, the particularities of each approach reveal that it is not the specific curatorial techniques – whether object-based or community-focused – but the relationships encircling those strategies that mediate reception. Offering a museological window into ongoing discussions of how cultural producers/curators and the audiences they presume/produce interface, these case studies signal the centrality of trust to reparative projects and to transforming social relations within the museum and beyond it.

BOOK/MEDIA REVIEWS

Laboratory of Learning: HBCU Laboratory Schools and Alabama State College Lab High in the Era of Jim Crow by Sharon Gay Pierson. New York: Peter Lang, 2014, 308 pp., $159.95, hardback.In Laboratory of Learning, educational historian Sharon Gay Pierson seeks to dispel the myth of inferior Black prior to Brown v Board of Education of Topeka (1954) by highlighting the obscured history of Historically Black Colleges and Universities' (HBCU) laboratory schools. Examining Alabama State College's lab school, her work fits firmly within the tradition of scholars such as Vanessa Siddle Walker (1996) and David Cecelski (1994) who have also shown the value of Black institutions in the Jim Crow South. However, Pierson's work does not simply add another case study. It argues that laboratory schools had a broader impact on southern Black that extended beyond their individual campuses.The book is divided into two sections. Part one provides a context for the laboratory school by focusing on the growth of Black secondary and pedagogical trends at the turn of the 20th century. Pierson noted that not only was southern separate and unequal, but Black high schools were often nonexistent as Alabama saw little utility in providing anything more than an elementary to African Americans. Until World War I, the few high schools available to African Americans were often found on the campuses of Black colleges. Alabama State's laboratory school offered its students a liberal arts inspired by progressive theorists such as John Dewey, George Counts, and Harold Rugg. School administrators also deftly avoided the industrial education model, a remarkable feat as the philosophy's headquarters at Tuskegee Institute lay less than fifty miles away.A particular strength of the book was its discussion of African Americans in the progressive educational movement. Far too often scholars pay scant attention to the ways African Americans contributed to or were affected by various currents in mainstream educational reform. As Pierson persuasively argues, the progressive movement's emphasis on exploring how democracy in the classroom could be used to battle societal inequality had a great appeal to African Americans. Alabama Sate championed this and other student-centered methods in their classrooms. These ideas were spread to a larger audience by the school's alumni, visitors who attended Alabama State's annual teaching institutes and other functions, and Black teacher organizations such as the Alabama State Teachers Association and the National Association of Teachers in Colored Schools. In this way, laboratory schools such as Alabama State influenced broader currents in southern Black education.Part two of the book provides an institutional history of Alabama State and an in-depth examination of the laboratory school. Under the direction of Harper Councill Trenholm, the college's president from 1925-1962, the laboratory school flourished. As an indication of its stature, it achieved accreditation, a rare feat for southern Black schools at the time. Just as important was the affirmation the school received from its local Black community. The school's highly qualified educators developed a reputation of setting high expectations that students consistently met as evidenced by the large number of graduates who went on to pursue college degrees. …

Can ‘the ghetto’ really take over the county? ‘Race’, generation & social change in local football in the UK

The involvement of people from black and minority ethnic backgrounds in local sports clubs is little used as a route for examining questions of their wider identity politics and exploring the impact of generational change in local sport. This is often because of difficulties involved in conducting qualitative research at the same site over an extended period. In this paper we report on two bouts of intensive ethnographic and interview study spanning a period of almost 20 years at a single African-Caribbean heritage football club in the city of Leicester, in the English east Midlands. Our findings suggest that considerable tensions have emerged over time inside the Meadbrooke Cavaliers club – tensions which threaten the historic cultural meaning of the club as a site for community solidarity, black masculine ‘resistance’ and identity formation. The commodification of local football in England from the early 1990s, signs of black occupational and social mobility and new ‘race’ dynamics for young black men in the city have all combined to reconfigure the role and meaning of the Cavaliers club in the lives of the local black communities which formed and have constituted the club since its founding in 1970.

The impact of local black residents’ socioeconomic status on white residents’ racial views

This paper extends the study of contextual influences on racial attitudes by asking how the SES of the local black community shapes the racial attitudes of local whites. Using responses to the 1998–2002 General Social Surveys merged with year 2000 census data, we compare the influences of black educational and economic composition on white residents’ attitudes. Finally, the independence of these effects from the impact of white contextual SES is assessed. Across three dimensions of racial attitudes, white residents’ views are more positive in localities where the black population contains more college graduates. However, such localities tend also to have highly educated white populations, as well as higher incomes among blacks and whites, and the multiple influences are inseparable. In contrast, many racial attitude measures show an independent effect of black economic composition, white residents reporting more negative views where the local African American community is poorer.

Developing concurrency messages for the black community in Seattle, Washington.

In the United States, Blacks are disproportionately impacted by HIV/AIDS. Sexual networks and concurrent relationships have emerged as important contributors to the heterosexual transmission of HIV. To date, Africa is the only continent where an understanding of the impact of sexual concurrency has been conveyed in HIV prevention messaging. This project was developed by researchers and members of the Seattle, Washington, African American and African-Born communities, using the principles of community-based participatory research (CBPR). Interest in developing concurrency messaging came from the community and resulted in the successful submission of a community-academic partnership proposal to develop and disseminate HIV prevention messaging around concurrency. The authors describe (a) the development of concurrency messaging through the integration of collected formative data and findings from the scientific literature; (b) the process of disseminating the message in the local Black community; and (c) important factors to consider in the development of similar campaigns.

“Freakin’ Out”: Remaking Masculinity through Punk Rock in Detroit

Detroit, as a birthplace for some of the earliest forms of punk rock, had a unique set of political and social conditions that made it ripe for the negotiation of race, sexuality, and gender within punk. One band of four Black brothers named “Death” navigated the space between their parent community and the world of what was perceived as “white” music. By performing a refusal to enact any one sense of “self,” Death performed a transgression, which was key to their own straightforward aesthetic. This transgression ostracized them from white and Black communities alike. Death forces us to reexamine the white-dominated narrative of punk music, which was thoroughly influenced by Black cultural modes from the outset. Early white punk bands MC5 and the Stooges had ready access to Black music and political activity; they performed new masculine identities based on an admiration for Black culture, as well as Black stereotypes. Paradoxically, as young Black men playing an early form of punk music, Death was unable to break into the world of white rock and was generally misunderstood in their local Black music community. Rather than concern themselves with an aesthetic style, Death pushed boundaries through their imaginative musical and political visions.

Singing the gospel: Using musical practices to build religious and racial communities

How can musical traditions be used to create meaningful social bonds? In an ethnographic study of an African-American church, I examine the process by which the religious and musical practice of gospel singing creates social ties. Bonds are built not just in ritual moments of worship, but in “backstage” moments when vocal techniques are taught, shared understandings of religious lyrics are nurtured, and a “worshipful” subjectivity is cultivated. Gospel choir singing binds youth to the church and symbolically to the local and global black community. I use the concept of “practice” to bring to the fore the social contexts in which the act of singing takes place.

Engaging Local Black and Minority Ethnic Communities in Health and Education

Engaging Local Black and Minority Ethnic Communities in Health and Education

African American Leisure Space in Santa Monica: The Beach Sometimes Known As the "Inkwell," 1900s-1960s

A section of the Ocean Park beach in Santa Monica, Califoirnia, served as an African American leisure space during the era of segregation. This article identifies the discrimination that African Americans endured, but also celebrates both the local black community formation and the sociable relaxation that Los Angeles African Americans enjoyed at this site.

Dissecting The Long Dream: The Revelation of Secrets on the Path to Manhood

els in the local black community. He is in the business of bodies. Bodies are mutilated, sold, lusted after, burned, and buried throughout the novel. Roughly a fourth of the way through, the central character of Rex (Fishbelly) Tucker is taken to his father's funeral parlor and forced to witness the autopsy of the body of Chris Sims, a friend of his who was killed and disfigured by a lynch mob. While this very graphic scene which depicts the bodily mutilation of Chris is one of the most discussed scenes in the

Intervening to change the diets of low-income women

Diet-related sources of ill health, including Fe-deficiency anaemia, are prevalent in the local South Asian population. This population also has a high prevalence of low-birth-weight babies. A need for preventative measures that take a holistic view to dietary change was identified in a South Asian community in Southampton, UK. A peer-led approach was used, training and developing a local workforce to become community food assistants. This workforce, drawn from local black and minority ethnic communities, ran practical 'hands-on' culturally-appropriate food-related activities within their communities that were successful in achieving long-term change in the diets of local women and their families. This model has the potential for achieving sustained behaviour change and is able to engage key target groups that can often be difficult to reach through more traditional routes.

African-American Roots Tourism in Brazil

The novelty of African-American roots tourism to Brazil is that to some extent it defies the secondary position occupied by Brazil in the African diaspora, a context marked by the hegemony of U.S.-centric conceptions of blackness. At the same time, roots tourism entails three kinds of inequalities: the disparity between those who have access to travel and those who do not, the belief of many African-American tourists that they can exchange what they view as their “modernity” for the “traditions” of the local black communities with whom they interact during their travels, and the much greater access of African-Americans to the means by which Africa and the diaspora can be represented. Blacks located in the North and the South of the American continent have unequal access to global currents of power. Thus, at the same time that it offers the possibility of challenging traditional North-South flows of cultural exchange, African-American roots tourism confirms the existing hierarchy within the black Atlantic.

W. E. B. Du Bois: Interpreting Religion and the Problem of the Negro Church

W. E. B. Du Bois's contribution to the study of the Church was his historical argument about the viability and influence of African culture. Du Bois asserted the partial autonomy and creativity of black culture. This was a crucial achievement in his day when normative theories of African cultural backwardness prevailed. Du Bois's detailed analyses of particular local black communities also enriched his theories on black culture and made possible more accurate generalizations about social change in black communities, an important task in a time when measurements of black progress or decline consumed observers of the Negro Problem. Du Bois anticipated postmodernist debates about Western religious claims to universality, and in his work among African Americans, he wrestled with many issues that we currently engage with in the contemporary self-reflective mode of our discipline. His work challenged the theoretical boundaries of the newly emerging disciplines of religion, sociology, and anthropology.

Tackling race inequalities: community development, mental health and diversity

This paper describes some findings from an evaluation of the effectiveness of a community development project that aimed to overcome inequalities in mental health care experienced by members of the local black and minority ethnic (BME) communities. A participatory action research design was used, involving people from BME communities who had experienced mental health problems and external stakeholders. The study relied largely on qualitative methodology. Findings reported here indicate that participants in the project valued the culturally and spiritually relevant support they received, but felt that more opportunities were needed for training and employment, greater representation on the project's management committee, and greater awareness of the project in the community. External stakeholders felt that the project gained credibility from its community base and valued its ability to work across faith traditions and cultures. It was also seen as successful in acting as a bridge between the communities and statutory services, although there were concerns about the project's relationship with frontline services. The paper proposes two models of community development that primary care trusts may wish to adopt ‐ radical or consensus, or a mixture of both ‐ in order to address inequalities in mental health service provision.

Facing inwards and outwards? Institutional racism, race equality and the role of Black and Asian professional associations

This article considers the role and influence of black and Asian professional associations in the criminal justice services, five years on from the pivotal Lawrence Inquiry (1999) and its assertion that ‘institutional racism’ was endemic in the British police service. Drawing on interviews with Chairpersons of seven professional associations, and a small case study of the Association of Black Probation Officers, the article explores their internal supportive function in assisting members who have experienced various forms of occupational racism. A tentative proposal is made for black and Asian professional associations to develop their external focus to utilize members’ life skills and cultural knowledge to challenge the institutional dynamics of racism within the criminal justice services, and to engage more directly with local black and Asian communities. Such work can be conceptually framed by conceiving of ethnicity as a resource.