The novels written by Paule Marshall are examined chronologically to demonstrate how Africa functions and is represented in her works. Published interviews and essays by Marshall are also examined, as well as critical analysis of her works by scholars. Africa is present in Paule Marshall's novels through ritual, history, language, and myth. Paule Marshall's work demonstrates how Africanisms operate in the United States and in the Caribbean. She articulates the need for people throughout the African diaspora to confront and use the past as a vehicle for empowerment. Marshall's protagonists are women who find that when they confront the past not only do they better understand themselves as African people, but they also gain greater awareness of their womanhood. Marshall's female protagonists discover that their African identity and their female identity are intertwined.

This study discussed the significant link between Anna Julia Cooper's A Voice from the South (1892) and the work of twentieth-century, black, Southern women writers through their exploration of specific issues, black feminist theory, and the conditions under which they were written. This thesis was based on the premise that Cooper's text can provide clarification for contemporary black women's issues, show a continuum in the work of Southern writers, and prove that similar conditions exist today for black women as in the nineteenth century. Chapter One defines some of the similar issues found in Cooper's work and contemporary writings. Chapter Two discusses the intellectual discourse that commonly identifies these issues, and how they are addressed, within the canon of black feminist theory. Chapter Three clarifies why these issues, in general, have existed in the writings of black, Southern women writers for over a century. It examines their common denominators, Southern heritage and ideological hegemony; and their position in the African-American literary tradition.

<p> Many studies have been conducted on the achievement gap between Caucasian and minority students (Bankston &amp; Caldas, 1998; Brown &amp; Donnor, 2011; Howard, 2008; O&rsquo;Conner, Lewis, &amp; Mueller, 2007; Osborne, 1999), as this gap has been a persistent problem for decades. However, despite more students of color gaining access to institutions of higher education, there is still a severe gap in college graduation rates (National Center for Education Statistics [NCES], 2011), with African American males being the least likely group to be found on college campuses (Dunn, 2012), and thus, possessing the lowest college graduation rate. St. Peter Claver Academy (pseudonym) is a Catholic, male high school located in an inner city, low-income community in the western United States. The demographic composition of the school is 65% Latino and 35% African American. Despite the fact that 100% of seniors are accepted into a college or university, the graduates of St. Peter Claver Academy have very poor college graduation rates. This qualitative study investigated the narratives of seven African-American graduates of the school in order to understand their college experiences, looking closely at attrition, retention, resilience, and persistence. Through the lens of critical bicultural theory, the voices of these former students are central to this study in an effort to seek common threads about their experiences, which can provide educators useful insight on how to improve the college graduation rate for this underrepresented student population group.</p>

<p> Late-adolescent African American students face unique difficulties on their journey to womanhood. As members of a double minority (i.e., African American and female) (Jean &amp; Feagin, 1998), certain limiting stereotypes relevant to both race and gender pose challenges to these students. They must overcome these challenges in order to excel within the various and changing environments they move through on a daily basis (hooks, 1981, 1994). Within the context of social justice, this dissertation provides insight into the role that language and literacy practices play to help enable the positive and affirming development of self-hood of African American college freshmen. This research is qualitative and employs critical narrative inquiry to analyze data collected from six academically high-achieving African American female freshmen college students attending Ivy League, Historically Black Colleges, and private and state universities in the United States.</p>

<p> This Critical Race Theory study used a qualitative methodology to analyze guided, online response interviews from African-American parents who have sons with eligibilities of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The study focused on the roles these parents played in navigating their son&rsquo;s K-8 education. The findings indicated some of the parents were isolated and ridiculed, whereas all the parents experienced roles as the Parent Advocate, the Parent Warrior, and the Triumphant Parent all while navigating the intersectionality of race, gender, and disability.</p>

<p> <i>Black Notes on Asia: Composite Figurations of Asia in the African American Transcultural Imagination, 1923-2013</i> sheds new light on the hitherto neglected engagements of African American writers and thinkers with various literary, cultural, and artistic traditions of Asia. Starting with a reevaluation of Lewis G. Alexander's transcultural remaking of haiku in 1923, this dissertation interrogates and revises the familiar interracial (read as "black-white") terms of the African American struggle for freedom and equality. While critics have long taken for granted these terms as the sine qua non of the African American literary imagination and practice, this dissertation demonstrates how authors like Alexander defied not only the implicit dichotomy of black-and-white but also the critical bias that represents African American literature as a nationally segregated tradition distinctly cut off from cultural sources beyond the border of the United States and made legible only within its narrowly racialized and racializing contexts. More specifically, <i> Black Notes on Asia</i> argues that the ruling conceptions of the so-called "Harlem Renaissance in black and white" and the reductive understanding of the Black Arts Movement as an uncomplicated, propagandistic expression of black nationalism, fail to pay due attention to their underlying multiracial/multicultural/transnational aesthetics and perspectives. In order to understand the full complexity and heterogeneity of the African American imagination from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present, it is necessary to account for cultural ebbs and flows, echoes and reverberations, beyond the United States, Europe and Africa, to include Asia. Rediscovering the hitherto overlooked traces and reflections of Asia within the African American imagination, this dissertation argues that Asia has provided numerous African American authors and intellectuals, canonized as well as forgotten, with additional or alternative cultural resources that liberated them from, or at least helped them destabilize, what they considered as the constraining racial and nationalist discourse of the United States. </p>

<p> This treatise examines the life and solo vocal works of composer Margaret Allison Bonds (1913-1972). It includes a biographical outline of Bonds's family background, education, and students. Her accomplishments as a concert pianist, composer, and music educator in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles are also described. The second half offers an overview of Bonds's solo vocal compositions. There is one chapter devoted to each of the three styles of song that she composed in her career: African-American spirituals, jazz/popular songs, and art songs. In addition, the treatise explores Bonds's relationship with the poets of the Harlem Renaissance, and her forays into the musical theatre genre. </p><p> Musical excerpts and descriptions of many of Bonds's published and unpublished solo vocal works are included. This document will be of benefit to singers, pianists, coaches, and musicologists interested in finding new repertoire with a distinctly American sound, as well as those who are seeking songs composed by American female composers, African-American composers, or art songs that include musical elements drawn from the spiritual or jazz. </p><p> Over half of Bonds's solo vocal works incorporated the poetry of Langston Hughes. The chapter entitled "The Art Songs: Poets of the Harlem Renaissance" is dedicated to the art song settings of Langston Hughes's poems and also includes one art song setting of a Count&eacute;e Cullen poem. The chapter entitled "The Art Songs" features settings of texts by Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Margaret Bonds, Marjorie May, Janice Lovoos, and Edmund Penney. </p><p> Appendix A of this document includes a list of Bonds's solo vocal works. It includes publication information, poet, and dates of composition. Appendix B includes seven digital photographs, including images of Margaret Bonds, Langston Hughes, William Levi Dawson, Florence Beatrice Price, Leonard Harper, Charlotte Holloman, McHenry Boatwright, and Maya Angelou. </p><p> Many of Margaret Bonds's songs were never published and are located in archival libraries and remain unknown. One purpose of this document is to expose these lesser known pieces to a larger audience, hopefully giving them a deserved place as a significant contribution to the American art song repertoire. </p>

<p> Black people's denial of bondage and colonial domination set the tone and frame for much of contemporary resistance to community and state violence. Like then, as it is today many individuals and groups are focused on dismantling the aspects of the system that oppress them. In Oakland Black women are working amongst themselves and in coalitions to dismantle the prison industrial complex, community violence, and other manifestations of institutionalized oppression. These women show a deep commitment to reversing the legitimatized abuse of state power and high instances of community and state violence in Black urban lives. </p><p> Violence, like any other disease, has the potential to seep into the cracks of every community and in the lives of every individual that it touches. Like a virus, violence travels through the various arteries of a family network or city streets and finds one more person to potentially infect with disengagement, a lack of self worth and the perpetuation of violation that plagues the community. In Oakland, the roots of violence are tied to historical realities, social inequity and structural barriers to opportunity that have left low-income communities and communities of color disproportionately experiencing and witnessing high rates of violence. </p><p> Because of this Black women in Oakland are familiar to instances of high murder rates, mass incarceration and racial profiling. In a qualitative research project I (1) explore the impact of state and community violence in the lives of Black women in Oakland; (2) examine the potential social and political conditions that contribute to the perpetuation of these experiences and (3) provide recommendations for community and systems change.</p>

<p> The work presented in this thesis argues for a new schema with which to approach the civil rights literature. Arguments for the necessity of this new approach utilize Milwaukee as a case study, analyzing the texts considered canonical to the city and offering a critique that will begin to break away from a lionized individual in favor of an egalitarian approach to history, specifically through the use of non-traditional methods such as quantitative analysis. Perhaps most important to the literature, this thesis addresses a fundamental, long-ignored aspect of the Civil Rights Movement by analyzing fiscal realities that face a grassroots organization agitating for school desegregation, the Milwaukee United School Integration Committee (MUSIC). Through quantitative analysis, the simple realities of donors, donations, and monetary outflow will be brought to the forefront of discussion. This data will also work to demasculinize and democratize a narrative largely composed of worshipped individuals by examining the demographic makeup of donors and volunteers in MUSIC. The information presented here will be vital to those wishing to articulate the Milwaukee movement as a unique presence in the field of civil rights literature as well as its place within the larger historiography. It will also provide the framework for a new way of understanding the rapidly growing volume of literature discussing the black freedom struggle.</p>

<p> Understanding how race shapes the lives of individuals and transforms institutions is central to social science. Yet, for many scholars, race is widely understood as a fixed and monolithic category that is resistant to manipulation. As a result, making causal claims about ``immutable characteristics'' such as race or ethnicity has been strongly discouraged by statisticians and experts of causal inference. In contrast to previous literature, I propose a different framework that, in some cases, reconciles race and causation. Using a lab experiment and observational data about the urban uprisings of the 1960s, I test whether racialized and politicized cues from a subordinate group (in this case, blacks) can change psychological, behavioral and attitudinal measures among a dominant group (in this case, whites). </p><p> Looking at more than 750 violent protests that flared up in black neighborhoods across the United States, I examine whether increased exposure to signals of black unrest is associated with decreased support for the Democratic party. In the 1964, 1968 and 1972 presidential elections, I find a strong negative relationship between exposure to civil unrest and the county-level Democratic vote share. I find a similar negative relationship between exposure to violent protests and Democratic vote share in congressional elections between 1968 and 1972. Finally, I find that in counterfactual scenarios of fewer violent protests the Democratic presidential nominee, Hubert Humphrey, would have beaten the Republican nominee, Richard Nixon, in the 1968 election. </p><p> In the lab experiment, I test how exposure to images of politicized and armed white and black men changes psychological, behavioral and attitudinal measures among subjects in the dominant (white) group. Methodologically, this study investigates the degree to which at least some aspects of race are better operationalized as variable, divisible, continuous and responsive to manipulation. Substantively, this experiment also attempts to assess the degree to which media representations of violence and politics might increase the salience of ethnic/racial identities, particularly in a dominant group. In the context of the 1960s urban uprisings, such a result might help explain why a significant subset of white voters switched away from the Democratic party, that had become identified with black interests, and towards candidates promising ``law and order.'.</p>