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This dissertation examines how race and gender interacted with economic variables to shape a class transition involving African American domestic laborers from 1863 to 1980. African American women performed household labor traditionally assigned to their racial group during slavery under new economic conditions that developed after emancipation. After slavery, these women were forced to contract their labor to white households and produce feudal surplus. The analysis suggests that African American women radically transformed the feudal economic and social conditions of paid household labor well into the twentieth century. These women were agents of a class transition from feudalism to independent commodity production. African American women, gradually and through small-scale incremental changes, redefined and standardized their jobs as household workers so that they were increasingly able to exchange pre-specified services for a given amount of money. These workers also developed creative strategies to break the continued association of their race with servitude. Rather than being inherent attributes of paid domestic work, flexibility and autonomy were outcomes of strategic choices made by African American women establishing themselves as independent producers of a service. This dissertation also examines how the material conditions and changing economic subjectivity associated with this class transition profoundly affected the construction of race and gender identities. By engaging in individual and collective actions that radically transformed the domestic labor process, African American women not only challenged and subverted the racialized and gendered associations of such work, but also produced new meanings of Blackness and womanhood. An understanding of the complex interactions of race, class, and gender in this historical example helps us make sense of contemporary inequalities as well as identify strategies for social change.

Between 1795 and 1954 the Black Burghardt family, maternal relatives of international figure W. E. B. Du Bois, owned homes and land in Great Barrington, MA. This ownership included Du Bois from 1928 to 1954. The Black Burghardts did not originally choose to settle in Great Barrington; they were placed there by political, economic, and social forces beyond their control. Many, in this large family, used their property as a place of residence and as a site for household and even market oriented production. They also used the land as collateral for financial transactions. In the beginning of the 20th century, Du Bois sought to document the long history of his family in Great Barrington. At least six generations can be traced in the various public documents and family documents. Approaching the history of an African American family from the point of view of land ownership has little precedent. Few 18th and 19 th century houses owned and occupied by African Americans are known nor have they been extensively studied. There are even fewer sources which concentrate on land and house ownership by individual African American families in rural New England. This dissertation adds to the work started by Du Bois and offers insight into the meaning that home and land ownership had to an African American family in rural New England over a period of 150 years.

This dissertation departs from current literature that treats moral reform as a conservative force in American history by focusing on the political intent of black reform activity. My overall goal is to dissociate black reform efforts from “middle-class” thinking by describing how free blacks in Philadelphia and New York City sought political change through moral improvement. In chapters on literary societies, educated ministers, Sunday schools and apprenticeships, I demonstrate the relationship between moral reform and political action. My premise is that lacking political rights and access to more direct means of protest, free blacks embraced moral reform to achieve racial advancement, refusing to accept their inferior status. However, most historians do not regard moral reform as being a legitimate form of protest. In fact, antebellum black leaders often have been unfairly disparaged in the historical record for their nonviolent reform methods. This dissertation calls for a new paradigm that merges moral reform with violent “political” action without assigning worth to either approach. It ultimately reflects the need for historians to allow for less explicitly “political” forms of protest, especially among relatively powerless groups who were precluded from directly confronting authority. This dissertation also joins with a growing body of literature that questions the presumed conservatism of “middle-class” America. Since all social classes are historically constructed, they do not possess a predetermined or fixed politics.

This dissertation examines the struggle for racial equality in urban fire departments from the late 19th century to the present. The first half contains extensive case studies of Black experiences in the New York City Fire Department (FDNY) and Baltimore City Fire Department (BFD). Particular emphasis is given to the process of Black inclusion, day-to-day and institutional race relations, and the backgrounds and experiences of Black firefighters in each fire department. The activities of local branches of national civil rights organizations such as the National Urban League and the NAACP, as well as the involvement of local Black political leaders in the struggle for Black inclusion and equal opportunity are chronicled, as are the activities of the Vulcan Society in New York and the Social Association of Fire Fighters in Baltimore. The second half of the dissertation explores the nationalization of the struggle for equal employment opportunity within the urban fire service. The 1970 formation of the International Association of Black Professional Fire Fighters (IABPFF), its relationship to the International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF), and the struggle for "community control" and Black representation within urban fire departments as well as the impact of Title VII, the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Caucus and Black Power movements, and urban rebellions on the organization's formation and objectives are examined. The evolution, implementation, limitations, and strengths of equal opportunity litigation and remedial relief programs as applied to urban fire departments, the activities of Black firefighters' organizations, the International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF), municipal governments, the Department of Justice, and the federal courts during the course of fire department litigation are also documented and analyzed.

This dissertation investigates the impact of the New York City-based Liberator magazine on the expansion and dissemination of African American political outlooks in the decade between 1960 and 1971. This study explores the history of this magazine as a critical political and cultural formation of these years. Growing out of the tradition of labor, Left-oriented radicalism as well as earlier forms of Black Nationalism at the turn of the 20th century, the Liberator provided an indispensable forum where many of the national and international concerns facing Black people could be discussed and debated. In its early days as the organ of the short-lived Liberation Committee for Africa and after, Liberator delivered cutting-edge political, social and cultural analyses of Black radicalism. Therefore, in accounting for the transition period between the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power radicalism, I argue that Liberator represents an important example of the strategic efforts of African American intellectuals, artists, and activists to shape autonomous political spaces through the establishment of a radical print culture.

This project examines the presence of African-derived spiritual ideals within the black literary tradition as a means of highlighting the fundamental influence of spirituality on communities of the modern black diaspora. I begin the discussion with an examination of traditional African spirituality, focusing on Nigerian author Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958). This discussion identifies four core principles of traditional African spirituality that resonate most thoroughly in diasporan communities: the interconnection of sacred and secular spheres, the concept of cyclical rather than linear time, the emphasis on a communal ethos, and the necessity for balance and reconciliation. I then examine the development of what I define as "Black Diasporan Spirituality," considering how these principles, resonating to varying degrees, constitute the basis for a philosophical system defining the universe and the place and role of mankind within it, as understood by African-descended peoples throughout the diaspora. Subsequently, I discuss the ways in which core elements of black spirituality at once inform and are represented in literature produced in Africa and the diaspora. Beginning with an analysis of James Weldon Johnson's God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1927) and Zora Neale Hurston's Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), I examine "Black Diasporan Spirituality" as a defining influence on the black oral tradition, centering my discussion on the cultural articulation of the African American song sermon. Using James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) and The Amen Corner (1954), I then examine the consequences of religious practice in the absence of black spiritual ideals. Focusing on the presence of spirituality in spaces which are not formally designated as religious, I then consider Gloria Naylor's Mama Day (1988) as a narrative that positions "Black Diasporan Spirituality" as vital to the healing processes of black communities, addressing both the trauma and the reconciliation inherent in the construction of diaspora. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that a clear understanding of the nature and character of black spirituality is essential to understanding not only the literature, but also the many circumstances—historical, social and cultural—of the communities out of which each text emerges.