Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of History, 2007. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-07, Section: A, page: 3108. Adviser: Claude Clegg. Title from dissertation home page (viewed Apr. 15, 2008).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of History, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Jul 14, 2010). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-12, Section: A, page: 4827. Adviser: Wendy Gamber.

<p> Using performance and cultural study lenses, this dissertation employs a case study methodology to explore how embodied Black male political voice was used during the 1968 Summer Olympic medal stand protest in Mexico City, Mexico. Creative moral protest is a "hallmark of nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience" <i>The art of moral protest</i>, (Jasper, 1997). By the late 1960s, several innovative expressions of political activism, involving Black men, had been set forth in the United States. However, on October 16, 1968 in Mexico City, the world witnessed one of history's most memorable and iconic protests. Using a brazen and unprecedented style, two Black US college athletes expanded socio/economic discourse relating to Black Americans. Epitomizing innovation in moral protest and cultural representation, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, with raised Black-gloved fists, furthered international awareness to the struggle for equal rights in America. Collectively, the track stars fashioned an unprecedented cultural discourse using imagery and symbolism as their political voice during the 1968 Olympic medal stand awards ceremony. </p><p> Grappling with political forces of White supremacy and institutional racism, the two Olympians combined social aptitude with academic and political consciousness. In doing so, the San Jose State University students used a visual protest language that aided in how the world defined politically conscious Black masculinity. Their display during the 1968 Summer Olympic medal stand ceremony helped to introduce many to the disenfranchised voice of Black America, still echoing against the backdrop of the ideology of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Following the deaths of King and Malcolm X. The two Olympians sought to expand upon the successful use of symbolic boycotts and protest marches to challenge an American meta-narrative about Black citizenship and identity. Black males, in particular, were involved in highly visible groups such as: <i> The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense</i> and, <i>SNCC</i>. The two met Professor Harry Edwards, leader of <i>the Olympic Project for Human Rights</i> (<i>OPHR</i>), while students at San Jose State University. They later joined <i>OPHR</i>. According to Edwards, author of the book <i>The Struggle That Must Be</i>, (Edwards, 1980), an Olympic boycott protest was intended to "set forth the imagery of intelligent Black men who were socially conscious" (Edwards, 1980,p.28).</p><p>

In 1854, acting as a federal commissioner under the Fugitive Slave Law, Suffolk County probate judge Edward Greeley Loring returned the alleged runaway Anthony Burns to slavery. In protest, antislavery activists petitioned legislators to exercise a little-used power to demand that the next governor remove Loring from state office. For three years, Know-Nothing governor Henry J. Gardner refused to do so, and Republican Nathaniel P. Banks removed the judge in 1858 with considerable reluctance. For both men, and for their parties, Loring's ordeal had ideological significance beyond his personal fate. This dissertation traces this significance to a lasting debate between conservatives and radical reformers over the principle of judicial independence from popular influences. Advocacy of elections for judges and other reforms went back to the Jeffersonian era, but antislavery activists took up the theme to protest judicial submission to the 1850 fugitive law. They joined earlier critics who condemned the state judiciary as a self-serving clique. Loring, who owed his position to family, social, and political ties, made an exemplary villain despite his efforts to show objective fairness during the Burns trial. Radicals demanded his removal in the name of popular moral sovereignty, while conservatives defended him in the interest of judicial independence. The radical implications of removal were somewhat muted by the Personal Liberty Law of 1855, which lent the campaign some statutory authority. The states-rights aspect of the controversy, however, remained divisive even after Republican victories made the judge's fall a reasonable certainty. The final debates over Loring in 1858 exposed a continuing conflict between conservatives and radicals within the Republican party that had already hindered its early development. Loring's story as a whole illustrates the enduring significance of Jackson-era reform politics beyond the acknowledged demise of the Jacksonian party system.

This dissertation examines certain dimensions of jazz rhetoric, performance, and organizational activity that occurred during the period of the Black Arts movement, the thrust of which corresponded to the larger goals and modes of expression of that phenomenon. The first chapter interrogates definitions of the Black Arts movement, and contextualizes the emergence of black consciousness themes arising in jazz in the 1960s and 1970s by considering the history of racial appeals and identity assertions in the music prior to this period. The second chapter documents the musical activities of the Black Arts era, identifying major tropes and analyzing and historicizing specific modes of carrying this Afrocentric message. The third chapter examines the rise of a generation of African American jazz critics, who sought to define the meaning of the music, and its relationship to black communities and the social and political movements engendering fundamental changes in the perception and practice of race in America. The fourth chapter engages the theme of African American community sponsorship of jazz. The relationship of jazz, and especially experimental jazz, to black communities has been considered largely a nil one. Focusing on the Black Experience in Sound concert series of The East, this chapter challenges the notion and presents evidence that many African Americans were quite invested in the music and its use as a nation-building tool. The conclusion briefly addresses organizational manifestations of self-determination in jazz, and makes an argument for a more expansive view of the Black Arts movement in assessing its achievements and lasting masterworks.

This dissertation examines the relationship between racial ideology, material consumption, and African America's struggle to secure civil and consumer privileges between 1850 and 1930. It evaluates how African American material discourses and consumption patterns subverted racial caricatures and pressed for African American civil rights and material opportunities. After the mid nineteenth century, caricatures of Black social behavior and material consumption were constructed in a wide range of popular discourses ranging from minstrelsy performances to travel accounts. These discourses and their powerful racist assumptions attempted to make all public space and civil privilege racially exclusive. White Americans and many aspiring European immigrants rapidly accepted that all difference should be interpreted through the lens of racial ideology, constructing a tacitly White racial backdrop against which all American class, cultural, and material difference was evaluated. Racial ideology rapidly was extended to a consumer marketplace which was itself transformed by an increased volume of commodities, new sales outlets and marketing techniques, and alluring promises to ease or erase social and material subordination. As in broader American society, racial ideology became the fundamental cornerstone of the nascent consumer culture, defining appropriate consumption patterns, casting a racial basis for material symbolism, and restricting African American privileges in public consumer space. Archaeological material culture from three sites in Annapolis, Maryland demonstrates how the civil and material aspirations of a series of African American households is reflected in the goods they consumed, their material exchange tactics, and the avoidance of certain commodities and marketers. Material culture and African American consumer discourses demonstrate that African Americans aspired to consumer culture's symbolic and material possibilities, were invested in many genteel values, and recognized consumer culture as a critical scene of racial struggle. Distinctive African American consumption tactics negotiated racist regulation, preserved African American cultural integrity, and undermined Black racial caricatures. African American consumers sought and often secured significant social and material opportunities, illuminated the precariousness of White identity, and subtly transformed African America's position in American society.

The specific purposes of this study were to identify and highlight the many and varied contributions Black people made in providing schooling for their children in the South from 1865 to 1954, and thereby, make a significant contribution to the literature on this subject. This study added weight to the historical importance Blacks have placed on the education of their children. Ignorance of this history affects how Black children are viewed, treated, taught, encouraged, or discouraged in the process of acquiring an education in this society. Fifty-one autobiographies were used as the primary data source. They spanned three major periods--Reconstruction, Post-Reconstruction and the period after World War I to the Brown decision. They were selected on the following criteria: the life of individuals who lived in the Southern region of the United States; and, individuals whose own personal experiences related to formal schooling as students, parents, teachers or community activists. This research, historical and largely descriptive, was designed to investigate the role Black parents and the Black community played in providing schooling for Black children in the South, from 1865 to 1954. These authors, in their own words, reported that their parents and communities placed high value on education and made many sacrifices in order to have their children acquire an education. It is clear from this study that the white authorities in control of the education of all children in America were primarily interested in the education of white children and this fact adversely affected the education of Black children. The research demonstrated that across the periods studied Black children did not have the same educational advantages that white school children had. Further, this study suggests the need to re-examine the issues related to why Black children are not given an equal educational opportunity. To monitor this process, Black parents, as the first teachers, must become more involved in the education of Black children. However, in order to do that the schools must bring Black parents into the system.

<p>In Selma, Alabama in 1965, local African Americans partnered with civil rights organizations to stage a movement for voting rights. The beating of peaceful black marchers by white state troopers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge that March catapulted the city and black demands for the ballot into the national spotlight. When the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed five months later, it cemented Selma as a symbol of voting rights. Since then, Selma has become a triumphal moment in the grand narrative of American democracy and citizenship. However, the years after the voting rights movement failed to bring economic opportunities and justice for black citizens in Selma. At the end of the twentieth century, numbing unemployment, gutted houses, and government transfer payments attested to barriers left unbroken by the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. How, then, did Selma become the site of a nationally-geared campaign for voting rights, and why was the right to vote not enough to bring economic justice for African Americans?</p><p>This dissertation is a local study that spans the course of century, one that looks at Selma and Dallas County as a place with a long history shaped by white supremacy and agricultural transformation, as well as local relationships and national developments. It begins in 1901, the year that the newly-passed Alabama constitution took the ballot away from nearly every African American in the state, and ends in 2000, when Selma's residents elected their first black mayor. Using newspapers and magazines, personal papers, organizational records, municipal records, federal publications, and oral histories, it examines how municipal, state, and national politics, as well as enormous economic shifts, intersected with and altered the lives of black and white residents in Dallas County, Alabama. </p><p>The multifaceted struggle of African Americans for freedom in Dallas County unfolded within the context of a century-long agricultural revolution in the Black Belt. African Americans' overlapping demands for economic opportunity, self-sufficiency, quality education, and meaningful political representation reflected and responded to local economic shifts from cotton to cattle to industry. The semi-autonomous community black Dallas County residents forged through farmers' organizations, schools, and societies under segregation later helped them mount a frontal challenge to the ramparts of white supremacy. The civil rights movement, however, grew to maturity at exactly the moment when cattle had usurped cotton's reign over the fields, altering the Black Belt's economic and social fabric. </p><p>Political rights for African Americans in Dallas County did not solve the postwar economic challenges of vanishing farms and the rise of low-wage industry. Meanwhile, local white officials vigorously fought to maintain political control in the wake of the civil rights movement. Their calculated intransigence delayed the meaningful participation of black residents in the economic and political life of Selma. The rise of the Sunbelt South and globalization further siphoned resources away from the struggling Black Belt. As the federal government retracted and nearby military bases closed in the late 1970s and 1980s, rural areas like Dallas County were left without resources in a new economy that favored high-skilled workers in urban centers. Examining black freedom struggles and economic transformation side-by-side illuminates how voting rights alone did not alter the regional network that concentrated both resources and poverty in an uneven process of development. </p><p>The vote brought political power, but it did not bring the economic justice, security, or quality education that made up the other half of African Americans' demands for freedom. By singularly focusing on the securing of voting rights, Selma became a pivotal moment in the story of American democracy, but black Dallas County residents' parallel demands for equal economic opportunities remained long after African Americans had won the vote. The triumphal narrative ignores the economic transformation that fundamentally altered the Black Belt. From cotton to cattle, industry to unemployment checks, black citizens perpetually found themselves on the losing end of economic change. At the end of the century, nearly four decades of federal divestment and globalization had sapped Dallas County of jobs, and the government's presence was felt mainly in the form of disability checks and food assistance. The political rights black Dallas County citizens had shed blood for in 1965 could not alone undo this legacy of economic inequality.</p> / Dissertation

<p> Maroon communities are often portrayed as renegade groups of Africans living within or on the fringes of some of the more popular slave societies such as Jamaica, Saint-Domingue (Haiti), Suriname, or Brazil, whose purpose or goals in their existence was never to strive towards universal emancipation of the African lot, and whose resistance and radicalism, if occurring during the Age of Revolution (i.e. Haiti), is often attributed to European influences during that era. This socio-cultural and political history about a lesser known group of maroons in Dominica challenges the preconceived notions of African maroonage and resistance, and is original in four ways: One, this dissertation demonstrates that the maroons of Dominica who lived in the interior of the island worked with the enslaved population on plantations on several occasions to overthrow the British colonial government in an attempt to assist their African brethren in freedom; Secondly, this work highlights the African origins of the spiritual and political philosophies, particularly the lesser credited Igbo, who comprised of a significant portion of Africans in Dominica, are what guided their anti-slavery and anti-colonial resistance; Thirdly, the maroons and enslaved populations, who demonstrated alliances with one another in Dominica during the 1790s and early nineteenth century were not influenced by French Revolutionary ideals, but were pursued for an alliance, and the former, in particular, often rejected alliances with French Revolutionary sympathizers; Lastly, this dissertation takes the maroons of Dominica outside the confines of a national history and connects it to the greater African Diaspora.</p>

<p> During the colonial and early antebellum periods, women of color on the Louisiana frontier received significant amounts of money and property from white male benefactors for themselves and their mixed-race children. Although state laws placed restrictions on inheritances and donations to concubines and illegitimate children, the majority of such transactions in southwest Louisiana went unchallenged or remained intact after white heirs challenged their legality. This study examines how free women of color or manumitted female slaves and their mixed-race children in southwest Louisiana acquired and maintained control of such property between 1740 and 1840, in spite of the laws that barred them from doing so. Few scholarly works have focused their attention exclusively to the lives of women of color on the Louisiana frontier during the colonial and early American era and those that have typically adhere to a very strict regional or urban focus, leaving out significant swaths of the state. This study scrutinizes the lives of women of color living on the Louisiana frontier between the years of 1740 and 1840, who formed long-term relationships with white men and received property as a result of these relationships.</p>