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This study utilized a cross-sectional design to report quantitative results. Equal numbers of African American men, religious and non-religious, were sought out for comparison. Participants must have identified as African American, been 30 years of age or older, and lived within 10 miles of Carbondale, IL during the time of the study. African American men are at an increased risk of developing many diet-related disparities. This study aimed to see if religion influenced these factors.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Housing discrimination is one of the main plights of many African Americans during their post WWII struggle from equality. It affected where African Americans could live, where they could work, where their children went to school, and it ultimately affected their means of accumulating capitol. Eventually, through legislation and the constant struggle for housing equality from local African Americans leaders and local community leaders, the discrimination marginally subsided and this allowed for African Americans to move away from the central city. This study is an examination of Indianapolis’s first African American suburbanites. This study focuses on residents from two Indianapolis suburbs that were predominantly African American and located outside of the central city. The goal of this paper is to try to understand, how these communities formed, try to understand who these African Americans were and most importantly what were their experiences as individuals with suburbanization post WWII and the effect that their suburbanization had on residential opportunities in Indianapolis.

This study investigated commitment in the romantic relationships of 16 African-American men and women, eight men and eight women, aged 20-23. Ten participants were currently in a committed relationship and six participants were not currently in a committed relationship at the time of the study. Interdependence theory guided this qualitative study to examine how participants defined commitment, what they expected from their partners, sources that were instrumental in their development of expectations of how a partner should behave in a committed relationship, and the meanings they attached to relational alternatives, investments, rewards, costs, and barriers. Results indicated that eight relational themes defined commitment: exclusivity, honesty, being supportive, spending time, communicating, getting respect, trust, and love. In addition, two types of commitment were identified, short-term and long-term. From this sample, there was a connection between the definition of commitment and the meanings attached to relational alternatives, investments, rewards, costs, and barriers. The sources of how a partner should behave served as the context for the definition of commitment and meanings attached to alternatives, investments, rewards, costs, and barriers. Suggestions for future research on close relationships among African-Americans are discussed. / Master of Science

As obesity has reached an epidemic level, the female population age 35 years and older is struggling with increased risks of death from type 2 diabetes, hypertension, coronary heart disease, stroke, and certain cancers. The purpose of this study was to explore the perception of overweight and obesity among African American women 35 years and older in Houston, Texas. A phenomenological approach was adopted for this study to explore the perception of overweight and obesity among African American women 35 years and older in Houston, Texas. This study was also guided by the Health Belief Model as a conceptual framework in relation to overweight prevention and obesity control. Flyers were distributed to recruit participants from church, fitness center, and AllcareMedical Center. Ten African American women 35 years and older living in Houston, Texas were selected to participate for this study. The selected participants were either obese, overweight, at risk of being obese or overweight or had family member who is either overweight or obese. Face-to-face interviews were conducted to collect data, and the information collected was coded for themes. Findings indicated the need to engage in physical exercise and eating right as strategies to reduce the rate of obesity. The study contributes to social change through awareness and education as it encourages health professionals to use the findings to develop relevant strategies to understand the impact of obesity while using the perceptions of overweight and obesity to improve health and well being among African American women 35 years and older.

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This dissertation demonstrates the Louisiana “Creole” culture from the Afrocentric perspective. This is unique as much of the research in the field has not been conducted from this perspective. It will specifically look at the language, food, music, dance, and spirituality of the southwest region of the state. These aspects were chosen due to their centrality and primacy in the culture, as well as their clear continuity from Africa. This research will also evaluate the African culture of Louisiana that is often defined as “Creole” and sometimes “Cajun.” It will interrogate the idea of “Creole” (creolite/creoleness, creolization), which is often defined as a mixture of various cultures/races and as a culture indigenous to a new land, through the theory of Afrocentricity. Ultimately this study is needed in order to demonstrate the Afrocentric claim that culture was not destroyed in the African Diaspora but instead maintained. / African American Studies

From the 1960s, through the Black Arts Movement, until her sudden death in December 2012, Jayne Cortez used her dynamic voice to fight oppression. as the first multiple-chapter study of Cortez’s musical collaborations, this dissertation adds to a growing body of critical work that examines Cortez’s radical poetry. In her “African Confluences” keynote address at Rutgers University, Cortez described herself as a member of a global community of black writers “protesting and calling for an end to self degradation, self fragmentation, self-corruption, and self-fear and selfishness… Poets using the image of Blackness to mean continuity, confidence, creativity and new possibilities.” Cortez created new possibilities through her collaborations with artists and writers across the African diaspora, including American free jazz musicians who worked alongside traditional West African master musicians. Cortez traveled extensively and cultivated lifelong relationships with musicians who challenged boundaries between artistic genres to create a distinctly kinetic form of jazz-inflected poetry that gave voices to black Americans and people displaced across the African diaspora. Cortez’s sustained collaborations with Bill Cole, Denardo Coleman, and her Firespitters band produced unparalleled multivocal cross-genre conversations that embodied the collective spirit of jazz improvisation. “‘When I Put on My Firespitter Mask’: Jayne Cortez’s (R)Evolutionary Musical Poetic Collaborations” offers a chronological analysis of selected collaborative performances and recordings with musicians. Beginning with her earliest collaborations, Cortez’s poetry blended elements of surrealism, Pan-Africanism, ecofeminism, performative poetics, and black vernacular music into dialogic calls to action that embodied diasporic community building through harmolodic improvisation and musical call and response. This dissertation applies the aforementioned theoretical frameworks to close readings and historical contextualization of multiple revisions of eleven poems, including poems published in out-of-print chapbooks, studio recordings, live recordings, unreleased live performance recordings, and uncatalogued documents such as poem drafts, journals, and handwritten performance notes located in fifteen boxes Cortez donated to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The appendices provide the most comprehensive timeline and list of Cortez’s publications available to date, with the intention of providing points of departure for forthcoming critical explorations of Cortez’s archive of over 400 poems and more than ninety recorded musical collaborations.