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This dissertation examines the American Colonization Society’s “scheme” which sought to deport black Americans to Liberia during the period of slavery. It also explains why a significant number of free African Americans in the North struggled to undermine the colonization movement. The questions that drive this study are: How did African American leaders utilize antislavery networks in the Atlantic world to challenge racial oppression and the colonization movement? How did black political discourse imbibe and reconfigure western concepts like nationalism? In what ways did African Americans foster transnational relationships with European reformers to undermine the colonization movement, the Atlantic slave trade, and the moral and religious implications of human bondage? While historians continue to study African Americans who left America, and settled in Liberia, few studies have been dedicated to examining the overwhelming opposition to black expatriation. My dissertation will attempt to fill this void, and to explore the origins of the colonization movement, and the various ways free African Americans in the North protested against it. This study also places anti-colonization ideology, rhetoric, and activism within the broader Abolition Movement by clarifying how black opposition to colonization set the groundwork for the “Immediatism” phase of antislavery agitation. Through protesting the colonization movement, black leaders sought to demonstrate that African Americans, and their kin in the diaspora, were afforded the same intellectual acumen, moral worth, and human faculties as their European American peers. Furthermore, they employed diverse strategies to challenge racial inequality, affirm their American identity, and critique American democracy. Black American critics of racial prejudice, slavery, and all manifestations of white supremacy, expressed a sense of African pride, while rooting their struggle against the Colonization Society within the belief that America would one day accept them as equal citizens. While the history of the American Colonization Society, and black resistance to their African colonization initiative, fits squarely within antebellum United States history, the topic crosses temporal and spatial boundaries, thus provoking researchers to consider the implications of Africa American agency and formation of a Pan-African worldview during the nineteenth century. Through black resistance to colonization, one can glean an important analytical framework for examining black nationalism and African diasporic identity.

The first African American newspaper, Freedom's Journal, has a historical, rhetorical, and spatial purpose. It not only showed the impact made by African Americans in the fight for their civil rights in the early 19th century, but as an artifact it illustrated and preserved that history allowing it to be studied centuries after the newspaper ceased printing. The purpose of The Resonance and Residue of the First African American Newspaper: How Freedom's Journal Created Space in the Early 19th Century is to provide an interdisciplinary approach to historical newspapers that illustrates an alternative history in this country — a history of and by African Americans. By combining both print and digital research methods, new historical, rhetorical, and spatial information can be discovered that illustrates how the first African American newspaper fought against the influences of white society in the early 19th century and created a space for the black community that became meaningful enough to transform America into a place in which African Americans identified as Americans. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to combine traditional research and close reading with digital analysis (machine reading) by using different digital tools to illustrate how Freedom's Journal used text to combat the influences/powers that were shaping the early 19th century, and create a new and different type of historical narrative about how one oppressed community was successfully able to fight another dominant community through the use of text.

This thesis examines the impacts of government policies on community mobilization in Orlando's Parramore neighborhood and the all-black town of Eatonville in Central Florida. The scope of this thesis covers the history of both communities from their formation in the 1880s to the end of the twentieth century. This research reveals the relationships between the predominantly black residents of Parramore and Eatonville and the largely white government officials over the development and maintenance of each community. By understanding the social creation of both communities during the era of Jim Crow, this thesis reveals the differing levels of power each community possessed that would impact their ability to turn their defined black spaces into black places. Moving forward, each community had to adjust to the impacts of integration that weakened the communal bonds that helped the community endure Jim Crow. However, in detailing the rise of citizen activism in the post-World War II period, the theory of infrastructural citizenship shapes this thesis in revealing how black residents in Parramore and Eatonville exercised their rights as citizens in making their voices heard surrounding various infrastructural changes. While their efforts did not always achieve their ultimate goals, it forced decision makers to anticipate and accommodate the opinions of the residents impacted by these decisions. This thesis uses historical analysis to place Parramore and Eatonville within the broader social, political, and economic contexts of events occurring in Florida, the American South and the country at large.

This project seeks a better understanding on how blackness has been peripheral to our understanding of the term Southerner. The purpose of this work is to examine an area where the intersection of race and region exists to more fully understand how blacks in the South have presented their sense of Southern identity. The chosen area of examination is the music of rhythm and blues. Rhythm and blues as a genre rose to prominence in the years following World War II. The main reason for analyzing rhythm and blues as an intersecting point of race and region is that the music is both a reflection and celebration of the Southern black musical tradition. Along with the sound there is an aesthetic to rhythm and blues that is distinctly of the black South. Within the scope of this work, the examination of rhythm and blues was done by first understanding the genres of music it was built upon; as a way to show the continuity of the Southern black musical tradition. From there, this work chose to identify three prominent rhythm and blues artist (Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, and Nina Simone) as a means to connect people, music, and region. The point in highlighting these artists is to demonstrate how aspects of black identity and Southern identity have intertwined through an institution like music. Through the prism of rhythm and blues there is evidence that Southern blacks did not see themselves absent of regional identity. In highlighting a point of intersection between blacks and the South that prioritizes their experience and sense of identity, this research represents a step in the importance of fully incorporating blacks into our understanding of the term Southerner.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.