National Association For The Advancement Of Colored People Research Articles

Bourbon, Black and White: Bourbon and Race in America, 1935-1975

ABSTRACT This article explores the cultural history of bourbon in the United States between the 1930s and the 1970s through the lenses of race, politics, and consumerism. Several related trends pushed bourbon’s cultural history in new directions during this time. Like many popular consumer products, Americans endowed bourbon with complex meanings that reflected imagined, contested notions of history and racial identities and hierarchies. As Black and white Americans bought, sold, drank, and talked about bourbon, they also grappled with racial conflict and social change. Distillers crafted new appeals to Black Americans to spur sales. Mass consumerism grew in importance as an arena of activism after the Second World War. Black activists targeted the bourbon industry in their ongoing fight against commercial racism and segregation. Bourbon became a touchstone in the politics of civil rights. Black and white commentators invoked contrasting bourbon symbolism and tropes in their civil rights rhetoric. These trends and dialogues flavored the meanings that Americans consumed as they drank bourbon. All the while, bourbon whiskey became a staple of the upwardly mobile, consumption-driven lifestyles of the middle and professional classes, regardless of their racial identities. To tell these stories, the article relies on bourbon-related advertising, journalism, and commentary in the Black and white presses, corporate market research materials and correspondence, and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) archival records.

Breaking the Bonds of Segregation

Abstract This article uncovers the financial knowledge and bond market campaigns of the paradigmatic non-violent revolution of the twentieth century—the civil rights movement. It builds on an interpretation made by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) during the early 1960s: segregation was a national problem because it was financed through a network of bankers across the country who specialized in the business of debt; certified by prominent bond attorneys in New York City, Chicago, and elsewhere; and because investors from around the country collected tax-exempt interest payments from indebted southern segregated municipalities. By weaving the internal memos, protest ephemera, and legal strategies of civil rights activists together with the credit assessments, scheduled bond offerings, and perspectives of financiers, this article reconstructs the attempts to politicize bond market transactions and efforts to place the economic certainty of segregation in doubt. In so doing, it offers a fresh perspective on the so-called classic phase of the civil rights movement (1954–1965). More generally, it raises powerful questions about the dilemmas of investment-focused campaigns, and how finance capital compounds the difficulties of organizing against authoritarian regimes.

Accounting and racial violence in the postbellum American South

PurposeThe paper aims to explore the relationship between accounting and racial violence through an investigation of sharecropping in the postbellum American South.Design/methodology/approachA range of primary sources including peonage case files of the US Department of Justice and the archives of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) are utilised. Data are analysed by reference to Randall Collins' theory of violence. Consistent with this theory, a micro-sociological approach to examining violent encounters is employed.FindingsIt is demonstrated that the production of alternative or competing accounts, accounting manipulation and failure to account generated interactions where confrontational tension culminated in bluster, physical attacks and lynching. Such violence took place in the context of potent racial ideologies and institutions.Originality/valueThe paper is distinctive in its focus on the interface between accounting and “actual” (as opposed to symbolic) violence. It reveals how accounting processes and traces featured in the highly charged emotional fields from which physical violence could erupt. The study advances knowledge of the role of accounting in race relations from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, a largely unexplored period in the accounting history literature. It also seeks to extend the research agenda on accounting and slavery (which has hitherto emphasised chattel slavery) to encompass the practice of debt peonage.

Clara Luper, Freedom's Classroom, and the Civil Rights Movement: A Conversation with Marilyn Luper Hildreth

Clara Luper, Freedom's Classroom, and the Civil Rights MovementA Conversation with Marilyn Luper Hildreth Editorial note: The University of Oklahoma Press's new edition of Behold the Walls is forthcoming in August 2023. Click for larger view View full resolution Ebony Iman Dallas, Songs of Freedom (2021), acrylic and Ghanaian textiles on hand-carved birchwood / Portrait of activist and teacher Clara Luper singing with members of the NAACP Youth Council [End Page 14] BEARING WITNESS In his ongoing column, which appears in every other issue, Karlos K. Hill highlights the efforts of cultural figures doing works of essential good around issues of social justice. ON AUGUST 19, 1958, a high school history teacher named Clara Luper and thirteen members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Youth Council, ranging in age from seven to fifteen, organized a sit-in at a segregated Katz Drug Store in downtown Oklahoma City. Within two days, the Katz Drug Company had desegregated not just this one local store but more than fifty locations in states across the Midwest. One of the first sit-ins of the civil rights movement, this peaceful protest by a small group of young activists would galvanize future demonstrators in Oklahoma City and throughout the nation. Over the next six years, Clara Luper and her students organized sit-ins, layins, and boycotts that would eventually lead to the desegregation of white downtown stores and restaurants in advance of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. By courageously fighting against injustice while simultaneously centering youth activism, Luper created an enduring legacy of nurturing social change through nonviolent civil disobedience. Clara Luper passed away in June 2011. On May 3, 2023, she would have turned one hundred years old. Additionally, August 19, 2023, will mark the sixty- fifth anniversary of the historic Katz Drug Store sit-in. In anticipation of these upcoming commemorations, I talked with Clara Luper's daughter, Marilyn Luper Hildreth, who participated in the Katz Drug Store sit-in, to help me understand its significance. Click for larger view View full resolution Karlos Hill: To start with a simple question, can you explain to readers who Clara Luper was to you? Marilyn Luper Hildreth: Clara Luper was my mother. And not only was she my mother, but she was a mother to many other children, both in our community and in our society. She would always make room for another child. Mom was a teacher before she became the Youth Council adviser, and she was really popular with her students. She enjoyed creating experiences for young people that they otherwise could never have had, and that was especially true in the classroom. She had a way of bringing history alive in her classes. For example, in order that they could better understand the functions of the government in Washington, DC, she had her students take part in mock elections, where they cast votes to elect fellow classmates as senators, members of the House of Representatives, and president. And for fifty years she took young people to the NAACP National Convention, including people who I call the "have-nots." They did not have a lot of money and did not have a lot of things, but she wanted to give them that opportunity, because she was able to see things in young people that others overlooked. [End Page 15] She believed that all children can learn, so she had to find out how best to teach those young people in order to motivate them to be the best that they could be. She remembered every one of her students for the rest of her life. She had a real concern for them and felt deeply committed to them, and they felt the same way about her. They knew that she would always be honest with them. Even when she was correcting them, they knew that she was trying to help guide them in the right direction. She tried to bring out the best in everyone she dealt with. Hill: Can you share a favorite story about your mother, perhaps a time when she helped to guide you in that same kind of way? Luper Hildreth: Mom...

In the Spirit of the Law

Research on the advancement of employment protections provided by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has focused on litigation and the role of civil rights groups in sponsoring this litigation. Yet the role of individual claims in presenting legal arguments for policy decisions at the agency level outside of litigation has been overlooked. Relying upon archival data from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), this article demonstrates that individual claims of discrimination can be strategically used to advance specific interpretations of laws and to create social change. In the formative years of the EEOC, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) collected individual claims to pressure the EEOC and Congress to establish affirmative action and other policies designed to advance progressive interpretations of Title VII. As such, claim-based campaigns may be used by interest groups to advance their agendas outside of the judicial system. At the same time, the assistance of the NAACP also reduced the number of claims that were delayed or denied, demonstrating that this type of advocacy has the potential to help claimants receive remedies to rights violations outside of the courts.

The Fight for Fair Training: Fair Employment, Defense Worker Training, and the African American Civil Rights Movement in the South, 1940–1945

The Fight for Fair Training:Fair Employment, Defense Worker Training, and the African American Civil Rights Movement in the South, 1940–1945 Bryant Etheridge (bio) If Thurgood Marshall took offense at being counseled on litigation strategy by someone who lacked legal training, he chose not to show it. John L. LeFlore, the secretary of the Mobile, Alabama, chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), was urging him to make better use of the Supreme Court's recent decision in Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1938). It was 1941, and LeFlore was deeply involved in the wartime civil rights struggles of Black Alabamians, especially their fight to gain employment in the state's booming industries. The Gaines ruling, he advised Marshall, constituted a vital doctrinal resource in the fight for fair employment. Marshall informed LeFlore that the NAACP's legal staff, in response to similar requests from most of the organization's branches, was already developing a test case that addressed LeFlore's concerns. At the upcoming annual conference in Houston, Texas, NAACP members from around the country would coordinate legal strategy. LeFlore, Marshall suggested, could contribute to that effort by representing the NAACP branches of Alabama at the June 1941 conference.1 [End Page 501] As LeFlore fought racism in wartime Mobile, he had no higher priority than winning access to good jobs for Black residents. The struggle to overcome white opposition to equal employment opportunity in the city's shipyards occupied him and other local activists for the rest of the war. While employment as unskilled laborers was often open to African Americans, semiskilled or skilled work was not. As a result, moving up the occupational ladder was a civil rights imperative in Mobile, as it was throughout the United States, during World War II. The assault on the Jim Crow racial division of labor was foremost on LeFlore's mind when he contacted Marshall.2 LeFlore proposed to make the Gaines case, a lawsuit that was part of the NAACP's campaign against segregation, central to attacking racialized economic inequality. The case involved an African American plaintiff, Lloyd Gaines, who had applied to the law school at the University of Missouri. The all-white university rejected Gaines's application. Missouri instead offered to pay Gaines's tuition at an out-of-state law school, a workaround that many southern states used to avoid complying with even the separate-but-equal stipulation of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Gaines declined that arrangement, and the NAACP's legal team filed suit. In 1938, the Supreme Court ruled that Missouri's tuition reimbursement program was unconstitutional. The ruling left the state with two options for graduate law education: to open a law school for Black students or to admit Black students to the existing institution. Although the decision stopped well short of ending segregation in higher education, it was an important milestone on the long road to Brown v. Board of Education (1954). With the Gaines lawsuit, NAACP lawyers aimed, in part, to make segregation too expensive to sustain. The cost of creating separate-but-equal programs in every area of graduate and professional study, they wagered, would prove too heavy a burden for southern states to bear.3 The faith LeFlore showed in the Gaines ruling as a solution to the problem of fair employment in Mobile's shipyards appears misplaced. The categorical distinction between the NAACP's legal campaign against segregated education, on one hand, and the concurrent but separate fight for economic justice, on the other, underpins our basic conceptualization of the civil rights movement in the 1940s. If alleviating [End Page 502] economic inequality was LeFlore's objective, his propounding the utility of Gaines seems to amount to a non sequitur. Perhaps LeFlore was confused. Perhaps, in offering guidance on constitutional law to an NAACP attorney, he had gotten in over his head and misconstrued the Court's ruling in Gaines. Or maybe LeFlore just screwed up and cited the wrong case. If LeFlore misunderstood the Gaines decision, he was not alone. He informed Marshall that in Mobile, Black residents stood broadly in support of using Gaines as a...

Mexican Americans with Moxie: A Transgenerational History of El Movimiento Chicano in Ventura County, California, 1945–1975

In Mexican Americans with Moxie, Frank P. Barajas eloquently makes a case that Ventura County was very much a part of the Chicana/o movement and by doing so forces a reckoning with Chicana/o movement historiography that largely omits mixed rural/urban settings. Ventura County is situated only four hours from the US–Mexico border and sixty miles northwest of Los Angeles, making it a top destination for Mexican migrants, who, he claims “also became Chicana-Chicano as they witnessed, participated in, and adapted to the cultural crosscurrents of the time” (p. 5, p.13).Barajas not only expands the regional parameters of the Chicana/o movement, he also argues that the Chicana/o movement was transgenerational and not solely made up of youth activists. He contends “that a collection of people from the Mexican American and Chicana-Chicano generations defined El Movimiento (the Chicano movement) in Ventura County” (p. 3). This transgenerational approach is what makes Mexican Americans with Moxie innovative. For Barajas, the Chicana/o movement was one that included two generations: “one born before World War II that came of age prior to the 1960s, and the other subsequently” (p. 2). He argues, and I agree, that Chicana/o movement historiography needs to move away from categorizing this politicized cohort as solely a youth movement.The book is divided into eight chapters, not including an introduction and conclusion. The first chapter sets up the political landscape of Ventura starting with the arrival of Cesar Chavez in 1958 and the establishment of the Community Service Organization (CSO) a year later (p. 14). Chapter 2 details efforts of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and CSO to end segregation in local schools as well as police brutality. This cross-racial coalition pre-dates the Chicana/o movement and sets the foundation for future efforts in the region to address racial imbalance in Ventura County. The third chapter turns to the formation of the Brown Berets of Oxnard and continues with a discussion of the CSO, Mexican American Political Association (MAPA), and Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA). Chapters 4 and 5 situate the legal struggles with the Oxnard Elementary School District to desegregate its schools and expose many of the school board members as successful in institutionalizing racism. These chapters also reveal what scholars of race and ethnicity have already confirmed—that housing segregation mirrors school segregation. For example, “Within schools, district officials created staggered attendance and playground schedules” (p. 115). Chapters 6 and 7 look at farmworker organizing efforts through the help of Chavez's UFW, highlighting the strike of Egg City, one of the nation's largest egg producers, on July 13, 1967, as well as other farm labor rights efforts. When UFWOC “led the men and women on a march through the city's streets,” students at Oxnard High School marched alongside them—demonstrating the cross-generational alliances during El Movimiento (p. 145). The final chapter, Chapter 8, follows the push by college students to bring Chicana/o studies programs to their campuses, especially at Moorpark College, and their efforts to hire Chicana/o faculty. This chapter also highlights how Chicana/o student activists worked with the Black Student Union at Ventura College to secure the Minority Student Center (pp. 176–77).For Barajas, it didn't matter much if one self-identified as Chicana/o, as was the case with César Chávez. What mattered most was the political engagement and consciousness against racist structures. Here, Barajas also emphasizes another important misjudgment of the Chicana/o community in the 1960s. The majority of Chicanas/os resided in mostly urban settings and consequently many had little to no experience working in California's agricultural industry. Yet they espoused, “WE ARE MEXICAN-AMERICANS, non-farmworkers who support Cesar Chavez . . . ” (p. 1). Chávez and the United Farm Workers union resonated with Chicana/o movement activists’ pleas for economic justice. The book demonstrates that indeed the Chicana/o movement was by all accounts and purposes a social movement that transcended generational lines (p.160).Although the book is rich in archival and oral histories, a discussion on the political significance of MAPA, Brown Berets, CSO, and others would have been helpful—mostly to hone in on how Ventura County differs or is similar to organizational chapters elsewhere. The discussion on desegregation could have also used further national context, especially because efforts to desegregate met similar resistance in other regions of the United States, more specifically, the East Coast. This conversation could have strengthened his argument and added to larger historiographical interventions.Mexican Americans with Moxie will undoubtedly be of use in Chicana/o studies, ethnic studies, social movement, history, twentieth-century race and ethnicity, and political science courses. Graduate and undergraduate students will find it an easy and enjoyable read. Barajas's book also serves as a reminder to today's young activists that they are part of a long trajectory of political activism.

Introduction toVisual Arts ResearchSpecial Issue, Body Cam: The Visual Regimes of Policing

Introduction to<i>Visual Arts Research</i>Special Issue, Body Cam: The Visual Regimes of Policing

The Phelps-Stokes Fund and the Institutional Imagination of Black Internationalism, 1941–1945

In 1941 and 1942, a committee of scholars, policy experts, and missionaries met in New York City to discuss the United States’ foreign policy toward Africa. This committee was convened by Anson Phelps Stokes, the founding director of the Phelps-Stokes Fund, a philanthropic organization focused on African American and African education.1 Stokes wanted the United States to play a major role in shaping the politics of the African continent once the Second World War ended. Further, he believed his fund—with its experience in missionary education, close ties to leaders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and connections to the State Department—was the ideal body to sway policymakers and “influenc[e] public opinion on wise lines” regarding an eventual postwar settlement in Africa.2 The group Stokes convened came to be called the Committee on Africa, the War, and Peace Aims (CAWPA). This committee operated in...

Black Beauty Culture Matters: Race, Gender, and Consumer Capitalism

Black Beauty Culture Matters: Race, Gender, and Consumer Capitalism Ingrid Banks Laila Haidarali. Brown Beauty: Color, Sex, and Race from the Harlem Renaissance to World War II. New York: New York University Press, 2018. 368 pp. ISBN 9781479875108 (cl); 9781479802081 (pb); 9781479838370 (ebook). Lynn M. Thomas. Beneath the Surface: A Transnational History of Skin Lighteners. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. 368 pp. ISBN 9781478005384 (cl); 9781478006428 (pb). Despite decades of scholarship on beauty culture, the terrain remains fertile for studies that add to our understanding of how women’s bodies bear messages of cultural and political import. Two recent publications stand as exemplary contributions that make compelling cases for scholars of race to look to beauty. Beauty offers an even greater understanding of how societies come to comprehend race and ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, culture, and much more. Through their respective texts on beauty culture, Laila Haidarali and Lynn M. Thomas provide beautifully rigorous examples of how notions of race and cultural practices are inherently unstable. In Brown Beauty: Color, Sex, and Race from the Harlem Renaissance to World War II, Laila Haidarali explores beauty through the lens of “New Negro” womanhood during the interwar years and examines how middle-class African Americans embraced an intra-racial middle ground of “brown” skin tones as a signifier of racial pride.1 In Beneath the Surface: A Transnational History of Skin Lighteners, Lynn M. Thomas uses South Africa as the foundation of a transnational study of skin lighteners by historicizing how such practices emerged and endure, albeit in often contradictory ways. Both texts remarkably illustrate beauty’s reach and influence within African diasporic contexts. Both projects focus on consumerism, capitalism, and the shifting meaning of racialized categories, using beauty as a magnificent window. Highlighting the Harlem Renaissance, Haidarali argues that middle-class African Americans privileged brown complexions in constructing “New Negro” womanhood. Centering brown as a marker of racial identity and beauty, African Americans portrayed the modern woman as an urban educated worker, while also presenting brown skin tones as a source of racial pride. Though the Black Power era of the mid-to-late 1960s in the United States is often viewed as the moment African Americans embraced a “Black is Beautiful” politic and aesthetic, Haidarali argues that “New Negroes” were [End Page 115] championing race pride by embracing brownness as representative of a diverse Blackness that challenged the supremacy of lighter skin tones and denigration of darker hues. However, “modern” women, or those coming of age in the early twentieth century, rejected this framing of New Negro womanhood, suggesting it was too connected to earlier Victorian-era tenets of domesticity and respectability. For early twentieth-century modern women, there was nothing “new” about New Negro womanhood as it smacked of the “old” view of African American womanhood. Instead, modern African American women embraced brownness as a means to express gendered, sexualized, and political ideals that ran counter to what they viewed as outdated sexist constructions of New Negro womanhood that privileged middle class respectability. Thus, a modern or transgressive view of new womanhood emerged during the interwar years. Haidarali illustrates how brown skin inspired these conflicting beliefs about African American womanhood, with what was viewed as “archaic” and “modern” existing alongside each other. Haidarali adeptly shows how the language of brownness flooded print culture, visual and literary, during the Harlem Renaissance. Winold Reiss’s New Negro paintings documented brown skin, most famously in the Brown Madonna (circa 1925). Poetry centered the experiences of “brown girls.” Advertisements of dolls and beauty preparations such as hair and skin products appropriated “brown” in order to appeal to African American women. Periodicals such as The Crisis, the official publication of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), highlighted brown-skinned women on covers. About W. E. B. Du Bois’s novel Browning the Dark Princess, Haidarali notes: “As narrative device and racial metaphor, brownness exposes multiple points of entry to interpret its meaning in relation both to Du Bois’s creative expression and the broader intellectual, political, and social climates abounding in 1920s America” (223). The novel was Du Bois’s attempt to center brownness within a transnational context. Haidarali...

A Marriage between Tricksters: Literary Heritage in Charles W. Chesnutt's "The Wife of His Youth"

A Marriage between Tricksters:Literary Heritage in Charles W. Chesnutt's "The Wife of His Youth" Yuki Miyazawa Charles W. Chesnutt expresses his outlook on creativity very clearly in the essay "Superstitions and Folk-Lore of the South" (1901). He notes that his knowledge of conjuration, a folk belief prevalent among African Americans in the southern US, provided "literary value" instead of a "sociological bearing" for his stories in The Conjure Woman (1899): Imagination . . . can only act upon data—one must have somewhere in his consciousness the ideas which he puts together to form a connected whole. Creative talent, of whatever grade, is, in the last analysis, only the power of rearrangement—there is nothing new under the sun. I was the more firmly impressed with this thought after I had interviewed half a dozen old women, and a genuine "conjure doctor;" for I discovered that the brilliant touches, due, I had thought, to my own imagination, were after all but dormant ideas, lodged in my childish mind by old Aunt This and old Uncle That, and awaiting only the spur of imagination to bring them again to the surface. (865) Here, "data" signifies the knowledge of African American folklore that Chesnutt acquired during his stay in North Carolina. In his short story collection, Chesnutt uses his knowledge of folklore to directly address the African American conjure tradition as noted by many scholars.1 He employs this mechanism in "Stories of the Color Line" and in the novel The Marrow of Tradition (1901). Eric J. Sundquist argues in his extensive study of ethnicity in American literature that although Chesnutt mentions his "curt personal belief that conjure [is] 'superstition'" (295), [End Page 271] he simultaneously "circles back, by the path of personal and historical memory, to merge his narrative art with the stories of the black ancestors" (297). It seems that writing fiction functioned as a way for Chesnutt to preserve racial memory. Chesnutt writes about the African American culture of the South, using features such as dialect and a folklore-based plot. Yet, he writes in a form adopted from European culture, sometimes quoting English and American writers such as Shakespeare, Tennyson, and Lincoln. Considering his statement that "one must have somewhere in his consciousness the ideas which he puts together to form a connected whole" (865), the European elements to which the characters sometimes refer, together with the African American elements, must be contemplated. An appropriate example of this notion can be found in "The Wife of His Youth" (1898), a well-known story that represents the African American and European sides of Chesnutt's own background. In this story, the protagonist Ryder is a mixed-race man who escapes from the South and becomes a member of a progressive society in the North by virtue of his pale skin and acquisition of knowledge about English literary culture. Later, he reunites with a black woman who used to be his wife back in the South. As Sundquist notes, English literary culture, which is evident from Ryder's direct quotations of Shakespeare and Tennyson, and, in a broader sense, his cultivated character, might be no more than something "laden with idealized notions borrowed from European culture" (301). The simultaneous use of the African American folklore of the southern US and European texts in "The Wife of His Youth" reflects Chesnutt's origins as a product of an environment filled with diverse cultures. Chesnutt's utilization of the two cultures as a cornerstone of his fiction evokes the concept of "double consciousness" proposed by W. E. B. Du Bois. Du Bois, Chesnutt's colleague at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), states in "Of Our Spiritual Strivings" (first published in 1897 as "Strivings of the Negro People"), Chapter 1 of The Souls of Black Folk (1903), that an African American is born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, [End Page 272] this sense of always looking at one's...

Racism and Confederate Monument Construction: Temporal Regimes Distinguishing the 1900s, 1960s, and Contemporary Decades

The bulk of Confederate monuments were constructed by White southerners in the early 1900s, but some were built much later. Recent research has assessed average relationships across the decades, but comparable evidence for distinct peaks in construction is lacking. My objective is to determine whether the timing of monument construction is connected to unique social contexts, particularly different manifestations of racism. I use multinomial regression analysis and a rich dataset spanning the U.S. South. Results confirm the central role of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), but also suggest stronger attachments to slavery and greater reliance on lynching increase the risk of erecting a monument in the early 1900s. In contrast, the resurgence of construction in the 1960s is unrelated to the presence of a UDC chapter and positively related to the presence of an National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) chapter. Construction in the decades after the 1960s shift again, suggesting the renewed importance of the UDC (in addition to the location of Civil War battles), but no role of racialized dynamics. Results suggest three distinct regimes of Confederate monument construction that broadly reflect the structural racism that dominated the early 1900s; the group threat/countermovement dynamics of the 1960s; and the “colorblind” era of racism associated with contemporary decades. This research contributes to knowledge of the factors associated with Confederate monument construction and provides a foundation for public and academic discussions of how racism is intertwined with these divisive public symbols.

The Racist Anti‐Racism of American Anthropology

AbstractIn 1909 Franz Boas conducted a massive study entitled Changes in Bodily Forms of Descendants of Immigrants. In this study, he demonstrated that Eastern and Southern European immigrants to the United States were not racially different from other Europeans because of what he called “the marvelous power of amalgamation.” Boas’s study dealt a blow to scientific racism because he demonstrated the plasticity and instability of racial types. Boas chose to emphasize the enormous gulf between the white and non‐white races. His research and advocacy were anti‐racist, but the way he promoted assimilation was racist. The next year W.E.B. Du Bois invited Boas to give the final lecture at the conference where the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was officially incorporated. Boas presented “The Real Race Problem,” in which he argued that the real problem was the “difference in type.” To solve it, the Negro needed to amalgamate by “encouraging the gradual process of lightening up this large body of people by the influx of white blood.” American anthropologists joined other Progressive Era reformers committed to assimilation, like the orphan train and Indian boarding school movements. They were each striving to be anti‐racist but went off the rails, contributing to the consolidation of whiteness and the perpetuation of racism.

Are Black state legislators more responsive to emails associated with the NAACP versus BLM? A field experiment on Black intragroup politics

AbstractWe fielded an experiment on a sample of approximately 400 Black state legislators to test whether they would be more responsive to an email that mentioned the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) relative to an email that mentioned Black Lives Matter (BLM). The experiment tested Cohen's theory of secondary marginalization (1999), whereby relatively advantaged members of a marginalized group regulate the behavior, attitudes, and access to resources of less advantaged members of the group. We expected that Black legislators would be less responsive to an email that referenced BLM, an organization that is associated with more marginalized members of the Black community. Contrary to our hypothesis, Black legislators were as responsive to emails referencing inspiration from BLM as they were to emails referencing inspiration from the NAACP. Thus, we do not find any evidence of intragroup discrimination by Black state legislators. To our knowledge, this is the first field experiment to test Cohen's theory of secondary marginalization.1

The Children of the Sun: Celebrating the One Hundred-Year Anniversary of The Brownies' Book

The Children of the Sun:Celebrating the One Hundred-Year Anniversary of The Brownies' Book Freeden Blume Oeur (bio) To Children, who with eager look Scanned vainly library shelf and nook, For History or Song or Story That told of Colored Peoples' glory,— We dedicate THE BROWNIES' BOOK. Jessie Fauset, "Dedication" (January 1920) 1 A little-known history is that W. E. B. Du Bois wished for his celebrated collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), to have a companion volume. Around 1900, Du Bois drafted a table of contents for a book intended for Black children. This shadow book, to borrow Kevin Young's term—a text that never was but "may haunt the very book we have in our hands" 2 —is the presence hovering over Souls, as the proposed contents literally adumbrates the spirit and structure of the classic book, with each chapter phrased prepositionally ("Of the …") and the proposed volume bracketed with a forethought and an afterthought. The provisionally titled book To My Dark Little Brothers and Sisters appeared to offer guidance on navigating a life behind a veil that prevented whites from seeing the full humanity of Black Americans. 3 Du Bois would develop these themes through the century's first decade. In the seventy-one prayers he composed in the final year of his first stay at Atlanta University (1909–10), the educator spoke behind the veil to the Black youth who were descendants of slaves and students at the primary and secondary schools housed inside the university. Du Bois's prayers offered moral lessons on the need to work hard, to serve others, and to have pride in one's race. 4 When Du Bois left Atlanta to begin his career with the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), he continued to write for and about [End Page 329] children as editor of the organization's periodical, The Crisis. In October 1912, the magazine debuted an annual "Children's Number," one of several special issues that covered topics such as women's suffrage and labor. On the cover of the inaugural Children's Number were two small Black girls in white dresses, one holding an opened book; the pages inside were adorned with headshots of more children, including babies. These images of sophistication, uplift, and good health remained central in subsequent issues of the Children's Number. They were intended "to build readers' pride in black beauty and physical vitality, and perhaps as a response to the eugenics movement and to the Progressive Era's interest in health reform." 5 By carefully curating these photographs, the magazine used art—the "handmaid of imagination," in Du Bois's words—to build understanding in wider audiences. 6 Many of these photos had Bible passages for captions, which resonates with Du Bois's earlier prayers and emphasized for readers both the transcendent quality of childhood and the moral obligation of adults to educate and care for their "brownies." In fact, Du Bois asserted in that first issue of the Children's Number that "all words of a magazine of ideas must point to the child—to that vast immortality and wide sweep and infinite possibility which the child represents." 7 The success of the Children's Number inspired The Brownies' Book: A Monthly Magazine for the Children of the Sun, the first major periodical for Black children, which had an all-too-brief but marvelous run between 1920 and 1921. This special issue of the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth celebrates the magazine's centennial and helps show how the magazine remains as timely as ever. To be sure, The Brownies' Book was not the first magazine to speak to African American youth. A number of periodicals predated The Brownies' Book , including Amelia E. Johnson's The Joy (1887) and The Ivy (1888), collections of Sunday school stories. Early issues of The Christian Recorder, the longest continuously running Black periodical in the United States, contained parenting and marital advice and columns addressed to young people. The newspaper used language ("there is no subject, at the time of the present crisis, that demands our attention more than the proper...

Black Americans and the Civil Rights Movement in the West ed. by Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz

Reviewed by: Black Americans and the Civil Rights Movement in the West ed. by Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz Nanosh Lucas Black Americans and the Civil Rights Movement in the West. Edited by Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz. Foreword by Quintard Taylor. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019. vii + 270. Maps, selected bibliography, index. $29.95, paper. Students broadening their knowledge of the civil rights movement in the West will appreciate this edited volume, Black Americans and the Civil Rights Movement in the West. It features 16 brief and accessible essays divided by region: the Far West, mountain states and the Desert Southwest, the Upper Midwest, and southwestern states such as Oklahoma and Texas. Two luminaries of the African American West, Quintard Taylor and Albert S. Broussard, dovetail the work with a generous foreword and excellent post-1970s epilogue. Authors in this collection immediately challenge the historical record, citing the earliest recorded lunchcounter sit-ins originating in 1941 Chicago under the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), not in Greensboro (xx, 9). They also cite Black women achieving early prominence in leadership in Seattle (30). Each scholar's range of professional experiences contributes to a mosaic of understanding in a field still reaching beyond the American Plantation South. On this point, civil rights scholarship on the Great Plains deserves special recognition. Three articles on the Upper Midwest span six states, including the Dakotas, Iowa, Minnesota, Kansas, and Nebraska. Each article introduces, as the authors refer to it, historiographically underdeveloped regions of the civil rights revolution. Independent scholar Betti Van Epps-Taylor notes North and South Dakota's long-held customs of segregation, establishing the uneven ways African Americans' civil rights activism developed across state lines. For example, earlier and more forceful involvement by chapters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in South Dakota followed race massacres in the 1920s. Why did South Dakota develop an NAACP so rapidly, despite the obvious need for its services in both states? Van Epps-Taylor leaves a trail for interested scholars to continue developing. A work of counterpoint, she ends on notes of racial progress made uneasy by the troubled road ahead. Emphasizing these persistent tensions, university professors Donald H. Strasser and Melodie Andrews explore the revolution in Iowa and Minnesota. These scholars emphasize how local needs guided the Black Panther Party and a similar organization, the "Soul Police" (191). Without their militancy, the authors argue, authorities would not have yielded to demands for more modest concessions (194–95). The struggle for civil rights in one region influenced another in what James Leiker, professor at Johnson County Community College, refers to as "regional symbiosis" (208). He illustrates how early developments in Kansas and Nebraska provided models for the revolution in other regions, leading to "short-term successes but longterm forgettability" (197). Confrontations along the color line were often surprisingly successful as a rapidly industrializing African American workforce exercised more buying power in traditionally closed-off areas, and custom, not law, governed segregation. Neither state, however, proved absent police brutality and mob violence. Leiker's adept combination of multiple themes, including women's roles, legal strategies, and protest politics, forms a most excellent closing to this volume's scholarship on the Plains. Deeply rooted in the historiographical traditions influenced by scholars such as Komozi Woodard and Jeanne Theoharis, this volume is certain to provide undergraduates and seasoned scholars alike with ample material for the classroom and a heavy trail of breadcrumbs for researchers in the archives. [End Page 219] Nanosh Lucas Department of History University of Oregon Copyright © 2021 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

In the Trenches of World War I-Era Texas: Letters from Black Railroaders to the United States Railroad Administration

In the Trenches of World War I-Era TexasLetters from Black Railroaders to the United States Railroad Administration Theresa A. Case (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Members of the Colored Trainmen of America, a union based in Houston, Texas; Kingsville, Texas; and DeQuincy, Louisiana. The organization got its start with the letter-writing campaigns of the World War I-era. RG R 0003-004, Colored Trainmen of America Collection, Houston Public Library, African American Library at the Gregory School. [End Page 270] In the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, inside fraying, bent folders, each bound by a pushpin, sit hundreds of World War I-era letters from Black railroad workers. The missives sit in the files of a long-forgotten federal agency, the United States Railroad Administration (USRA), which, during the "Great War," managed the nation's railroads. The letters convey the aspirations and frustrations of Black railroaders from across the country. More than 120 of the letters were written by people from the Lone Star State. The main catalyst for this flood of mail was the USRA's call for substantial wage increases, back pay, and equal pay for equal work. As their peers did nationally, the 128 Black petitioners in Texas pressed the government to enforce its own mandates. Many sought an outcome that was extraordinary in its boldness: to realize the democratic and egalitarian promise of the war in one of the most rigidly segregated and discriminatory industries in the nation. The remnants of their labors allow a reconstruction of World War I-era Texas civil rights and labor struggles heretofore hidden from view. Previous scholars have studied Black railroad workers' communications to the USRA and contributed an understanding of the roots, context, and consequences of their efforts. Historians Joe Trotter and Liesl Miller Orenic contend that the letters' authors sought to "transform policies" of the federal government "into a vehicle for the improvement of their own [End Page 271] position in the railroad industry." Paul Michel Taillon cast the letters as an "empowering" form of "political action" that held up the ideal of equal citizenship and challenged the government to fulfill its true role as an impartial arbiter and guarantor of justice. Other historians, chiefly Eric Arnesen and Joseph Kelly, have drawn on the USRA collection as part of broader regional and national studies. Scholars have yet to piece together a story around the correspondence from World War I-era Texas and determine what they reveal about Black workers in that specific time and place.1 Historians of early twentieth-century Texas Black working-class history have mined a plethora of sources, including oral histories, government and company documents, legal and union records, newspaper reports, and the papers of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).2 The petitions to the USRA open yet another portal into this past. They are unique in that they relate, in immediate, raw form, the desires and strategies of Black working-class actors who lived more than a century ago. Few other direct sources exist on Black railroaders.3 The letters are also notable in that the names of professionals and business and community leaders are largely absent from mention. The railroad porters, brakemen, porter-brakemen, and shop workers who authored or signed these communications seem to have acted and thought independently of the broader community leadership. For the most part, they did not [End Page 272] organize under the mantel of the NAACP, which in 1919 boasted almost eight thousand Texas members.4 Such an example of working-class selforganization goes against the grain of the historiography, which tends to highlight cross-class cooperation or the activism of the Black middle class.5 The letters show that a mass of Black railroaders coordinated along racial lines among fellow local railroad workers or attached themselves to regional or national organizations of this nature. Their very signatures are testimony to the collective nature of their endeavors; numerous letters list multiple claimants or record the name of an individual that the others had chosen to sign on their behalf. While some authors appealed carefully to White paternalism, a...

Philip A. Payton Jr. and the Making of Harlem Revisited

Philip A. Payton Jr. and the Making of Harlem Revisited Oliver Ayers (bio) James Weldon Johnson's 1930 book, Black Manhattan, remains a defining text of the Harlem Renaissance. Weldon Johnson wrote the manuscript while executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and blended political analysis with a historical survey. The work added to a chorus of interwar intellectuals emphasizing Harlem's centrality to the African American experience. When it came to the roots of this story, one figure loomed large: the movement of Black people to Harlem in the first decades of the century was "fathered and engineered" by real estate entrepreneur Philip A. Payton Jr. The transformation of Harlem into "the intellectual and artistic capital of the Negro world," in this bourgeois and paternalistic conception, stemmed from the benefits of modern and sanitary houses, opportunities that had opened, in turn, "due to the efforts made first by Mr. Payton."1 Payton's reputation as the "Father of Colored Harlem" was already established by the time Weldon Johnson put pen to paper, and in some ways, his legend proved resilient. Through various twists and turns in urban scholarship in the second half of the twentieth century, Payton and his most high-profile business endeavor—the Afro-American Realty Company (AARC)—usually played at least a supporting role. Gilbert Osofsky afforded the subject a whole chapter in his classic work Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto, tracing the trials and tribulations of Payton's business career to conclude that he and the AARC "helped [End Page 346] lay the foundation of the largest Negro ghetto in the world."2 Even as scholars shunned the pejorative connotations of "ghettoization" in favor of more nuanced readings of Harlem's birth, Payton remained a popular character. David Levering Lewis afforded Payton an entertaining walk-on part in his classic study of the Harlem Renaissance, When Harlem Was in Vogue. In this account, Payton was a "high-rolling young Afro-American realtor" who was quick to seize on opportunities, especially the one afforded by a murder at an apartment on 133rd Street where Payton capitalized on white residents fleeing in panic by replacing them with "reliable tenants of his own race."3 Irma Watkins-Owens, meanwhile, deployed a case study of the "Payton block" on 131st Street to make a series of valuable larger points about the ethnonational and socioeconomic diversity of early twentieth-century Harlem. Most recently of all, Kevin McGruder's worthy efforts to break down simplistic narratives of Black "invasion" versus white "resistance" in Harlem's early years still had room for the AARC's rise and fall, pointing out that Payton remained active on the real estate scene even after this venture's controversial collapse in 1908.4 Yet these fine-grained local studies occupy just one place in a sprawling interdisciplinary literature on Black Harlem's first decades.5 To highlight three important directions in this work, interdisciplinary scholars have studied the manifold cultural productions [End Page 347] (especially literature, art, and music) produced in and about Harlem during the 1920s "Renaissance"; studies have emphasized the contributions of women in Harlem as political agents, builders of community, and cultural producers; and historians have established Harlem's position as a hotbed of protest important in its own right that also connected to national and, in a particularly popular line of inquiry, international historical currents. There are innumerable subsidiary debates and points of contention across these works, but there is one common thread: Philip Payton, the "Father of Colored Harlem," is largely missing in action.6 The voluminous literature cited above has, of course, enriched our understanding of Harlem's historical importance, and an attempt to resuscitate ahistorical paternalistic clichés about the area's birth would not be a wise exercise. Yet this article contends, when interrogated in a critical and expansive fashion, Payton's historical story improves our understanding of Harlem's early days and their long-range significance, not least because of the live nature of some fundamental questions about what, when, and where should be the focus of scholarly attention. In regards to the interwar "Renaissance," start dates range from toward...

Roundtable on the Pandemics of Racism, Environmental Injustice, and COVID-19 in America

Roundtable on the Pandemics of Racism, Environmental Injustice, and COVID-19 in America

The Doubts of Their Fathers: The God Debate and the Conflict between African American Churches and Civil Rights Organizations between the World Wars

The Doubts of Their Fathers:The God Debate and the Conflict between African American Churches and Civil Rights Organizations between the World Wars Stephen Tuck (bio) In february 1923, William Pickens, the field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), penned an article in the black radical journal The Messenger called "Things Nobody Believes." The nobody was anyone "with intelligence." The things included bible stories, creation, miracles, Christ's resurrection, Christian creeds, a material heaven, and hell—which was "a helluvanidea." Most Christian teaching was "superstitious buncombe," Pickens asserted, and any "man who believes anything simply because somebody believed it two or three thousand years ago, is an idiot."1 "Pickens Denies Resurrection" and "Dean Pickens Says There Is No Hell" were front-page headlines in African American newspapers.2 Born in South Carolina in 1881, the son of former slaves, Pickens was one of the most high-profile African American leaders of the era, a renowned educator, columnist, orator, and civil rights activist. The NAACP's press release for Pickens's appointment as field secretary in 1920 trumpeted, "No orator of the race is so well known to colored Americans as Mr. Pickens." Pickens published his second autobiography in 1923, his speeches attracted large audiences, and his postbag [End Page 625] was full of fan mail, including one poem that started with the somewhat predictable rhyme, "Pickens, you're the dickens."3 Outspoken, impulsive, and frequently combative, Pickens was quick to get into arguments with anyone who crossed his path, from Marcus Garvey to his daughter's dentist.4 Or as he put it to his NAACP colleague W. E. B. Du Bois in 1921, "I have heard of men without enemies and I have often wondered what they could be doing." High on Pickens's hit list were the superstitions and dogmas "that dispense with the necessity for reason or judgement," including the Christianity that was preached in—as Pickens put it—"the average Negro church."5 Pickens had, in fact, been active in African American church circles earlier in his career. In 1922, just the year before "Things Nobody Believes," he had been a speaker at the Bishops' Council of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. But from the publication of this article onward, the NAACP's main ambassador to local communities spoke out with the zeal of the convert that he was from his self-described traditional Baptist upbringing.6 Part of Pickens's critique was of the institution of the black church and its personnel. After a meeting in [End Page 626] Pennsylvania in 1923, Pickens complained to the NAACP head office, "'The preachers help here in the usual way—by not hindering much. … [T]hey do nothing to help.'"7 Pickens frequently lampooned black clergy for their immorality, too. "We ordinary sinners," he mocked in a newspaper column, "have not even a chance to hit the spotlight any longer."8 (He also condemned "Ku Kluxed pulpits" in white churches, where the Klan had bought preachers by making "donations."9) But Pickens argued that the problem with Christianity in the "average Negro church" was not just misguided behavior that needed reform but also misguided beliefs that needed debunking. For Pickens, these beliefs not only were out-of-date and irrational but also had practical, detrimental consequences for the struggle for equality and the state of the country. He was frustrated when people appealed to their maker rather than applying themselves to make society better.10 In articles and speeches, Pickens insisted that progress for African Americans would come through self-reliance and scientific thought.11 He also noted that white supremacists were quick to invoke the "God alibi." When people "drag God into the argument," he warned, "you can usually look out for some scoundrelism that could not get by on any real logic."12 "Things Nobody Believes" was a liberal theological position expressed with Pickens's characteristic gusto. But such a position, asserted Levi J. Coppin of Philadelphia, an influential AME bishop, "is out of harmony with the prevailing doctrine of the Christian Church." "So greatly at variance is his [Pickens's] credo from what is...