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Courting Communities focuses on the writing and oratory of nineteenth-century African-American women whose racial uplift projects troubled the boundaries of race, nation and gender. In particular, it reexamines the politics of gender in nationalist movements and black women's creative response within and against both state and insurgent black nationalist discourses. Courting Communities highlights the ideas and rhetorical strategies of female activists considered to be less important than the prominent male nationalists. Yet their story is significant precisely because it does not fit into the pre-established categories of nationalism and leadership bequeathed to us from the past. ... Read more

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Over the last 35 years, practice of Santeria and the Yoruba religion in the United States has grown as the result of African American search for identity and large scale Cuban migration. While the ritual and belief systems of Santeria and the Yoruba Religion are essentially the same, the practical religion of both differs. Both center around questions of group identity and the concerns of their practitioners. This book focuses on the changes in the Yoruba Practical Religion of the Converted in the African American community. Through insighful attention to rich ethnographic detail, the author explores the beliefs, practices, and rituals of this religious community.
(Ph.D. dissertation, City University of New York, 1991; revised with new preface, introduction, afterword) ... Read more

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Examines the origins and development of the Civil Rights movement in Atlanta, Georgia, between 1946 and 1981, contrasting the city's image of racial progress with its social, political, and economic realities. Touches on issues such as political pressure and residential segregation, and concludes t ... Read more

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Based on careful reading of Du Bois' writings and with a combination of analytical and narrative approaches, the author probes the reasons and dynamics behind the changes of Du Bois strategies concerning the solution to the American race problem. ... Read more

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The Art of the Black Essay unveils the power of the African American essay to bring about a meditative shift in the minds of readers, to catapult them beyond racial ideology - by immersing them in it - and to elicit in them, ultimately, democratic change. ... Read more

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Providing new insight into debates over race and representation in the media, this ethnographic study explores the ways in which African Americans are depicted in television situation comedies and the meanings that African American audiences assign to such representations. The author ponders the reasons why blacks are relegated to comedy, and explores audiences' perspectives on a variety of issues, including how blackness is defined through television, the impact of stereotyping on societal perceptions, and the positive side of comedies. ... Read more

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Critics have noted that the subversion of black stereotypes was a major preoccupation of early African American writers.This study explores the subversion of the "mammy" stereotype in a broad range of works by black women writers.Bryant examines the writings of Harriet Jacobs, Frances E. W. Harper, Pauline Hopkins, and others, and finds that these authors reject depictions of the familiar flat "mammy" figure, who is defined solely by her domestic chores and responsibilities, in favor of older female characters of great complexity.
(Ph.D. dissertation, Kent State University, 1998; revised with new preface) ... Read more

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This book offers an interdisciplinary analysis of how contemporary American prison narratives reflect and produce ideologies of masculinity in the United States, and in so doing, compellingly engages popular culture in order to demonstrate the profound ways in which implicit understandings of prison life shape all Americans, and their reactions to people both incarcerated and not. ... Read more

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As both a preeminent scholar of Balck Angelican and Episcopalians and devout parishoner, the late James Hewitt writes an illuminus hsitory of one of the most famous black congregrations in America.From its humble beginnings, St. Philip's originated from classes conducted by Elais Neau and other Angelic clerks for the society for the propagations of the Gospel in Foreign Parts.From these cateisem classes emerged a higly educated, African-American group comprised of free and enslaved blacks.W.E.B Dubuois hailed it as the foundation for the Talented Tenth in his classic book Souls of Balck Folk After the American Revolution, St. Philip's has since becoem the church of middle-class blacks across New York City.Hewlitt's careful and percise scholarship chronicles over two centuries of of the church's history, which fills a significant lagun in African-American Religious history. ... Read more

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This dissertation examines the cultural and educational history of central Missouri between 1820 and 1860. In particular, the issue of the master-slave relationships and how they affected education (broadly defined as the transmission of Southern culture) is studied. Although, Missouri was one of the lowest in slave population during the Antebellum period, Central Missouri, or what became known as Little Dixie, had slave percentages that rivaled many regions and counties of the deep-south. However, the slaves and slave owners interacted on a regular basis which affected cultural transmission in the areas of religion, work, and community. Generally, slave owners in Little Dixie showed a pattern of paternalism in all these areas. The slaves, on the hand, did not always accept their master's paternalism and attempted to forge a life of their own. ... Read more

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Rather than discussing one aspect of women's anti-lynching activism, this book examines the subject in its entirety, from the 1890s to 1940s. It also discusses how differing goals and perceptions of the problem led to conflict within the movement.
In the last decade of the nineteenth century, black women began a protest against lynching that eventually swelled into a sizable movement. Ida B. Wells, one of the fist anti-lynching advocates, attacked the notion that lynching protected white women, proving with statistics that most men who were lynched were never even accused of rape but were hung for a variety of real or concocted offenses. Wells' fight against lynching included a strategy of investigation and exposure that eventually became the template for all anti-lynching activism.
The founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909 drew women of both races into the anti-lynching fight. In the 1920s, the NAACP began an unsuccessful two decade battle for federal anti-lynching legislation that brought the spotlight of public scrutiny to lynching.
In the 1930s, a large group of southern white women organized under the leadership of Jessie Daniel Ames to reject the protection that lynching supposedly offered in their name. Organized as the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, the women were opposed to a federal law, yet sought to eradicate lynching through education and by engaging the support of local law officials.
The decline of lynching in the late 1930s resulted from a combination of social and political factors; but women anti-lynching activists had an undeniable impact on helping bring about the decline of lynching.

(Ph.D. dissertation, Ohio State University, 1998; revised with new preface, bibliography, and index) ... Read more

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From 1880 to 1940, Hopkins, Fauset, and Bonner shaped an African American female response to national and global issues as they fought to rid the world of racism, restrictive gender roles, and oppression.Between 1880 and 1916, using traditional 19th-century literary genres spliced with modern techniques, Hopkins roused her peers to resist segregation and to end reconstruction and the objectification of black women. Serving as the editor for The Colored American Magazine from 1900 to 1904 and writing novels, plays, short stories, anthropological pieces, and historical tributes, Hopkins evoked the fiery spirit of abolitionism, claiming that the battle had not yet been completed. From 1912 through 1932, Fauset wrote in a variety of genres, including the novel, children's literature, travelogs, poetry, and editorials. While working as literary editor for The Crisis, she wrote about her own special concern: the machinations of middle class black communities and the manner in which popular racist and sexist images bombarded and destroyed the integrity of the black self. Bonner composed 25 pieces between 1925 and 1949, examining the urban environment and exposed the triple threat of segregation, sexism, and ghettoization.
(Ph.D. dissertation, Rutgers University, 1997; revised with new introduction, afterword) ... Read more

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The war industries associated with World War II brought unparalleled employment opportunities for African Americans in San Francisco, a city whose African American population grew by over 650% between 1940 and 1945. With this population increase came an increase in racial discrimination directed at African Americans, primarily in the employment and housing sectors. In San Francisco, most African Americans were effectively barred from renting or buying homes in all but a few neighborhoods and, except for the well-educated and lucky, employment opportunities were open in near-entry levels for white-collar positions or in unskilled and semi-skilled blue-collar positions. As San Francisco's African American population expanded, civil rights groups formed coalitions to picket and protest, thereby effectively expanding job opportunities and opening the housing market for African American San Franciscans. This book describes and explains some of the obstacles and triumphs faced and achieved in areas such as housing, employment, education and civil rights. It reaches across disciplines from African American studies and history into urban studies and sociology.