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This thesis examines a group of 114 burials found within the Terre Haute African Cemetery in Midlothian, Virginia, using gender and resistance as frameworks through which to understand the relationships that members of the historically Black Huguenot Spring community had with the American funeral industry as it developed parallel to the cemetery’s use history from roughly 1800 to 1934. The movement for the beautification of death and increasing emphasis on material goods for funerary commemoration beginning in the nineteenth century did not occur in a vacuum; this work explores the ways in which Huguenot Springs community members chose to participate and adapt these practices to their needs and economic context. This thesis is also interested in the legacies of historic African American cemeteries as sites for community memory, vindication, and the enactment of agency, both historically and today.

This paper examines the way that history and the archive interact with an examination of the civil rights movement in Philadelphia in the 1960s. Lack of accessibility may detrimentally affect historians' analyses. This paper is an assessment of what both writers and archivists can do to help diminish oversights. Included is an investigation of the short-lived Black Coalition and the way the organization is represented in scholarship. How do the representations differ from the story the primary sources tell? Also examined is the relationship between Cecil B. Moore and Martin Luther King, Jr. What primary sources exist that illuminate their friendship? How has their friendship been portrayed in secondary works? The paper outlines the discovery of video footage of the two men and how this footage complicates widely-held perceptions of their association. Lastly, this thesis offers remedies to allow for greater accessibility of primary source documents, most notably the role of digitization within the archive. Included in these suggestions are analyses of existing digital initiatives and suggestions for future projects. Digitization initiatives may be the means by which to bridge the gap currently facing archivists and historians today. / History

This thesis examines of the religious and philosophical origins of racism, arguing that anti-black, anti-African racism has its origins in the biblical account of the ancient Israelites’ exodus from Egypt and the events recounted in the Hebrew scriptures. It begins with an examination of the nature of racism itself, considering how the contemporary experience of and scholarship about racism can illuminate the search for racism’s historical origins. Contemporary experience has taught us that the functioning of racism often operates independently of the explicit racial prejudice coupled with power once thought to comprise it. This understanding has been reflected in scholarship that has examined how racism has functioned through hierarchical discourse, a concept which is defined and analyzed at some length. Following this examination comes a “genealogical” tracing of hierarchical discourse about African phenomena in the Western-dominated academy, leading to the centrality of the religious concept of idolatry in the making of racist accounts of African phenomena. Finally, the thesis concludes with a chapter on the mytho-historical exodus event, which gave birth to this concept of idolatry, analyzing the meaning and significance of the event in the making of racist discourse. This thesis demonstrates that a broader understanding of racism as an outgrowth of a worldview necessarily hostile to alternatives, when applied to the study of the historical development of racism, paints a far more convincing and complete portrait of the origins of racism, its historical development, and its present functioning than studies based on a more narrow understanding of racism. / African American Studies

African American Music has always served to document the history of enslaved Africans in America. It takes its roots in African Spirituality and originally pervades all aspects of African life. That Music has been transformed as soon as it got on this side of the Atlantic Ocean in a context of slavery and oppression. As historical documents, African American Music has served African Americans to deal with their experience in America from slavery to freedom. This work studies how Black Spirituals and the Blues have played a tremendous role in building an African American identity and in raising race consciousness in an oppressed people in a perpetual quest for freedom and equal rights in America. / African American Studies

This dissertation examines the conflict over slavery and freedom in Philadelphia from 1820 to 1847. As the northernmost southern city in a state that bordered three slave states, Philadelphia maintained a long tradition of abolitionism and fugitive slave activity. Conflicts that arose over fugitive slaves and the kidnapping of free African-Americans forced Philadelphians to confront the politics of slavery. This dissertation argues that until 1847, Pennsylvania was in effect a slave state. The work of proslavery groups, namely slave masters, their agents, white and black kidnappers, and local, state, and national political supporters, undermined the ostensible successes of state laws designed to protect the freedom of African-Americans in Pennsylvania. Commonly referred to as “liberty laws,” this legislation exposed the inherent difficulty in determining the free or enslaved status of not only fugitive slaves but also African-American kidnapping victims. By studying the specific fugitive or kidnapping cases that inspired these liberty laws, one finds that time and again African-Americans and their allies forced white politicians to grapple with the reality that Pennsylvania was not a safe-haven for African-Americans, regardless of their condition of bondage or freedom. Furthermore, these cases often precipitated into desperate rescues and bloody riots on the streets of Philadelphia; these civil wars in miniature reflected the negotiated and compromised realities of living while black in the city. Ordinary African-Americans living in Philadelphia bore the burden of comity, or friendly relations between states, by practicing what I term “street diplomacy”: the up-close and personal struggles over freedom and slavery that had local, state, and national ramifications. In a larger sense, street diplomacy in Philadelphia magnified the stakes of national comity, i.e. the Union, by showcasing how dividing states by their condition of bondage remained impossible due to permeable geographic borders that fostered perpetual fugitive slave and kidnapping crises. Thus, this dissertation argues that African-Americans and their allies’ struggles with slave-masters, slave-catchers, kidnappers and proslavery politicians disrupted the best efforts of white politicians to maintain a compromised and compromising Union. / History

This dissertation is an interdisciplinary rhetorical project that explores the discourse of race and technology in the African-American experience, particularly at HBCUs. It examines HBCUs as a site that historically and actively embodies the African-American rhetorical tradition, resists American racial animus, and works as a conduit and a corrective for the discourse of race and technology in America. The first argument this dissertation makes is that there has been an ongoing discursive tradition of technology within the institutional framework of HBCUs that long prefigures “the digital divide” debate. These conversations not only envision how best technology can be used, but also how HBCU leaders envisioned an approach to technology in order to accomplish community goals. The second argument that this dissertation attempts to make is that this persistent discourse within HBCUs is embedded with an ethos of community well-being and support. I am referring to this notion of support as a “techno-ethos”: something hardwired into the DNA of HBCUs since its inception, and, when ignored, can have disastrous, embarrassing, or counterproductive results. Finally, this dissertation is designed to acknowledge the value of applying theories of technological discourse to the study of HBCUs and to offer avenues of practical application for the successful use of a techno-ethos of support for HBCUs on a programmatic and institutional level. / English