<p> Community colleges enroll nearly half of the students in public undergraduate programs and a disproportionate number of first-generation, low-income, underprepared, and minority students. The new national completion agenda initiated by President Barack Obama had brought both visibility and pressure to community colleges, which had completion rates of less than 25% for first-time and full-time African-American students and even lower rates for part-time students. When comparing four-year collegiate institutions with community colleges, more African-American males had enrolled into community colleges because of open admission policies, a variety of program offerings, and convenient locations. In contrast, community colleges had more likely lost these particular students because of employment, leniency within admission policies, and personal challenges. A qualitative case study provided some lacking reasons why these students drop out, and these circumstances may subsequently lead to indications of how to decrease the community college dropout rate. The specific problem of interest is the perceptions and experiences that African-American male students had for dropping out of community college before attaining a certificate or associate&rsquo;s degree or transferring to a four-year institution. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to explore the perceptions and lived experiences of African-American male community college students regarding college dropout. The participants of this study were 10 African-American male former community college students who withdrew from an urban multi-campus in North Texas without transferring to a four-year college or university, or without attaining a certificate or associate&rsquo;s degree from the community college. Participants were students formerly enrolled at the institution for at least one entire two-semester year. Recommendations concerning these students should be advised on the pros and cons of being employed while attending school during their initial counseling appointment with college personnel. Students should be informed on the difficulties, stress, and anxiety they may receive balancing their job with employment. Advisors should assist these students with skills such as time management and organization to reduce stress and anxiety. If permissible, advisors should also collaborate with students to plan class schedules that may be more flexible concerning their employment. Counseling services also need to be available to assist with stress, anxiety, and other difficulties and uncertainties. Faculty should also be involved to the extent of modifying assignments, tests, etc., in order to assist student success. </p><p> On the other hand, students may need to look at classes that are available online as well as seek job opportunities that have flexible work days and times. Community colleges should create an environment that is deeply rooted in the college and outside community. College administrators, community leaders, and other stakeholders may need to create student-friendly employers, which could be advertised in the college newspaper, or school&rsquo;s website. These types of employers could provide student friendly policies such as daycare and tuition reimbursement plans, merchandise discounts, and flexible work schedules. The second recommendation is to make sure African-American male students are engaged with the community college to encompass efficient academic advisement, career counseling, college transfer, and support services. The third recommendation is that this particular group of students may need to be provided mentors. Community leaders and other stakeholders who are men of color should be part of the educational experience for African-American males in college to show them what can happen with hard work and attaining a college degree. This particular group of students needs to be viewed holistically, and mentors may provide a personable, positive connection to keep these students in college.</p><p>

<p> The purpose of this qualitative research was to explore how self-identified academically successful students perceived their nonresident African American fathers&rsquo; involvement in their education and to determine ways to encourage paternal participation in schools. Joyce Epstein&rsquo;s Six Types of Parental Involvement Typology was used as assess how the nonresident African American fathers were involved in their children&rsquo;s education. The research design used for this study was a basic interpretive qualitative approach. Participants in this study were students who attend or have previously graduated from a four-year university or college. There were 25 participants in the study. The students were 18&ndash;23 years of age. The data collection method for the study was in the form of a 60-minute in-depth interview with each participant. Semistructured interview questions were used to collect information for the study. </p><p> Data obtained from the interviews revealed eight themes: (a) encouragement, (b) breaking the cycle, (c) sports, (d) help with schoolwork, (e) offering advice, (f) financial assistance, (g) phone calls, and (h) helping others with similar struggles. The participants revealed that their fathers were not involved directly in their schools, as measured according to Epstein&rsquo;s six types of parent involvement, but rather the fathers were involved in indirect ways in accordance to Dewey&rsquo;s view on education. </p><p> Two of the themes were more participant based: (a) the need to break the cycle of paternal absence, so that their children would not grow up without knowing their fathers; and (b) the desire to be of some support and to offer assistance to others going through the same struggle of not having their fathers in their lives. </p><p> The findings revealed that the involvement of the nonresident African American fathers in this study did not conform to Epstein&rsquo;s parental involvement model, but rather their involvement was indirectly involved in their children&rsquo;s education. Physical absence of the father does not mean that he is not important, but rather that various factors may hinder his involvement with his children. Schools should make a conscious effort to foster relationships between fathers and their children. Nonresident African American fathers can make a difference.</p><p>

This study will investigate family life and explore the realities and the resilience of traditional, Black middle class families in Carver City-Lincoln Gardens through changing times. This research will contribute to the literature on local history in Tampa, with a particular focus on Black family. The goal of this study is to demonstrate how Black families support and sustain themselves through the collective efforts of the community and extend kinships.

<p> The increased demand for qualified STEM workers, necessitates addressing the bachelor&rsquo;s science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) degree achievement among African Americans and other underrepresented populations. Using inquiry derived from Harper&rsquo;s (2010) Anti-Deficit Achievement Framework, this study sought to explore the factors that contribute to the successful degree completion of African American STEM students within a large comprehensive university system. Coding of the twelve semi-structured interviews revealed six major themes: a) K-12/precollege educational experiences, b) motivation to complete a STEM degree, c) systems of social support, d) extracurricular activities and out-of-class experiences, e) addressing stereotyping and discrimination, and f) faculty behaviors and dispositions. All themes were intertwined at each phase of participants&rsquo; academic careers, thereby, highlighting the complexity of this population&rsquo;s experience and what is needed to address their low STEM degree attainment. Findings indicated that this student population benefits from positive, sustained faculty-student interactions, holistic STEM success programming, and genuine networks of social support. Furthermore, Harper&rsquo;s framework can be modified to explore the motivation of African American STEM students as well as the African American student&rsquo;s relationship with disability support services.</p><p>

This paper examines the racially segregationist practices and the integrationist, inclusionist formation of African American leader Dr. T.R.M. Howard during his tenure as a surgeon and entrepreneur in the all-black Mississippi Delta community of Mound Bayou, 1942-1956. The paper analytically investigates the careful racial negotiations that were required of Howard as he advanced a separatist but egalitarian economic and social plan for Delta blacks. This separatist plan, it is argued, is grounded in the racial pragmatism of the Seventh-day Adventist church which provided a bibliocentric, Tuskegee-inspired education to Howard from youth through medical school and beyond. Howard’s adherence to Adventist racial codes provided him with unique tools to establish financial strength and social cachet whereby he could in time shift to a more inclusionist, desegregationist focus. Howard’s separatist racial pragmatism is demonstrated in his creation of an economic power base in the 1940s. The 1950s shift to an inclusive position appears principally in three developments in Howard’s Mound Bayou career: the founding of the Regional Council for Negro Leadership, his activism after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, and his involvement in the trial of Emmett Till’s killers. Evidence is given from a number of primary sources, including both regional and national newspapers and the collected papers of Mississippi House Speaker Walter Sillers. The thesis argues that Howard’s pragmatism was both informed by Adventist racial pragmatism and provided the base whereby he could challenge Jim Crow directly; the pattern is accepting and enhancing racial segregation for the purpose of developing the means to work toward a racially inclusive, integrationist ideal. This pattern appears in Adventist evangelist practice, and it appears, with striking resemblance, in Howard’s work in Mound Bayou.

As education focuses increasingly on standards based assessment, social studies must be examined for its integration of Black History in the United States History curriculum. Using a Critical Race Theory lens, this directed content analysis attempts to examine the Florida Standards for United States History to determine if and how Black History is integrated into United States History courses. The study also makes use of Banks’ (1994) “levels of integration” to explore the degree to which this is accomplished. In addition, lesson plans created and/or endorsed by the state of Florida are analyzed for their inclusion of Black History. Data and analysis from this study demonstrate that while Black History is integrated to varying degrees across the K-12 United States History Florida Standards, the “levels of integration” (Banks, 1994) and topics covered do not offer a complete historical narrative. Similarly, while the lesson plans approved by the state of Florida often reflect a higher “level of integration” (Banks, 1994) and historical understanding, the limited topics of slavery and the Civil Rights Movement prevent students from seeing the development of Black History across the continuum of United States History. Further, the findings suggest that standards should be developed that directly address the role race and racism play in the development of the United States. These findings can be useful to both administrators and teachers looking to develop standards which help form an accurate historical understanding of the development of the United States. The study recommends that United States History courses and state standards in United States History focus on the role racism has played in developing the United States, include the voices of people of color, and focus on social justice in the United States History curriculum

In recent years, efforts to transform food environments have played a key role in urban revitalization strategies. On one hand, concerns over urban food deserts have spurred efforts to attract supermarkets to places where access to healthy food is difficult for lower income residents. On the other, the creation of new spaces of consumption, such as trendy restaurants and food retail, has helped cities rebrand low-income communities as cultural destinations of leisure and tourism. In cities around the US, these processes often overlap, converting poorer neighborhoods into places more desirable for the middle-class. My dissertation research examines the social and historical forces that have given rise to these twin processes in Miami’s poorest neighborhood, Overtown, a historically Black community on the cusp of rapidly encroaching gentrification. My project incorporates a mix of methods from urban geography, anthropology, and the emerging geohumanities, including geospatial mapping, historical analysis, participatory observation, and in-depth interviews. In triangulating these methods, I first unearth Overtown’s vibrant food environment during Jim Crow segregation and then trace its decline through urban renewal, expressway construction, and public divestment, focusing particularly on the dismantling of Black food businesses. I also investigate the spatial politics of recent urban agriculture projects and community redevelopment practices, the latter of which aim to remake Overtown as a cultural dining and entertainment district in the image of its former heydays. This research is theoretically informed by and contributes to work on urban foodscapes, urban geographies of race, and African American foodways. Based on my empirical findings, I argue that redevelopment practices in Overtown are undermining networks of social and economic interdependency in the existing foodscape, effectively reproducing the spatial and racial urbicide once delivered by more overt forms of racism. By linking place-based racial histories to the production of inequitable urban food systems, this research reveals the underlying geographies of struggle and dispossession that have shaped the production of both food deserts and gentrifying foodie districts.

This is an investigation into the ways that postmodern theories and feminist theories have both failed to learn from each other and yet also reveal the blindness' implicit in each other. Postmodern theory has consistently failed to engage gender in any significant way and feminist theory has consisted failed to find the usefulness of the methods and questions posed by postmodern theorists. Both approaches have failed to address the very real and important perspectives of the post colonial others who have been addressing the questions of race, gender, history, and agency for hundred of years. The second half of this investigation looks specifically at the work of three African American women writers, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor and Gayle Jones, in their most recent work. All three novels, Beloved, Mama Day and Corregidora are historical novels concerned with the legacy of slavery, and these narratives themselves exceed all the expectation for postmodern theory and feminist theory in inviting us to understand the relationship between history, memory and the now. In effect the work of these writers succeeds in "theorizing the present" in ways that both feminism and postmodernism fail.

This dissertation examines how contemporary African American women writers have used the novel of selfhood to represent African American girls' and women's struggle to achieve self-understanding and development during the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. In doing so, this dissertation expounds on the ways in which race, class, gender, sexuality, social justice movements, and community affect African American female characters' journey toward selfhood. Through this study I am interested in exploring the messages African American communities communicate to girls and women about life, race, gender, and sexuality. How characters interpret this information and then negotiate between their individual desires and goals and the expectations of their communities, as well as the effect learning about African American or African Diaspora history and culture has on protagonists are also central concerns here. The novels analyzed in this study are Alice Walker's Meridian (1976), Ntozake Shange's Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo (1982), and Toni Morrison's Love (2003). Drawing upon male, female, and African American Bildungsroman scholarship, Civil Rights and Black Power ideology, and black feminist theoretical frameworks, this study offers an interdisciplinary close textual analysis of African American women's novels of selfhood depicting several models of self-development to illuminate the struggles African American women face in their journey toward selfhood. This dissertation diverges from previous scholarship in that it places greater emphasis on the role of community and explores the influence the social justice movements of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, specifically the Civil Rights, Black Power/Black Arts, and Women's liberation movements had on African American women's self-concept.

Internalized racism is a contributing factor to the inability of African Americans to overcome racism. (Speight, 2007) Because this is a cognitive phenomenon over which individuals can have agency, it is important to study, understand, and seek out ways that African Americans are able to gain a liberatory perspective in the midst of a racist society. By using colonization psychology and post-traumatic slave psychology to define the phenomenon, and Jackson's Black identity development model theory to ground and analyze participants' process of liberation, this study used phenomenological in-depth interviewing to understand the experiences of African American and Black women who have gained more consciousness of their internalized racism. The researcher interviewed 11 U.S. Born African American and Black women for an hour and a half to gain their understanding of internalized racism and liberation. The study found that Black and African American women in a process of liberation (1) move from experiencing lack of control to an experience of having agency; (2) gain agency from developing greater knowledge and pride of a positive black identity; (3) replace negative socialization with a knowledge of self; and 4) are supported in their liberation by a systemic analysis of racism. The study also found that (1) internalized racism and liberation are complexly defined phenomena, (2) participants continued to practice manifestations of internalized racism while practicing a liberatory consciousness, which confirms the theories of the cyclical nature of identity, and (3) racial identity development models offer a framework for understanding a transition from internalized racism towards liberation but lack clarity about how transformation actually occurs.