My dissertation, Racing the City: Intentional Integration and the Pursuit of Racial Justice in Post-WWII America, examines the creation, experience, and meaning of intentionally integrated residential space in the latter half of the twentieth century. Entering into the growing historiographical conversations on post-war American cities and the northern civil rights movement, I argue that with a strong commitment to maintaining residential cohesion and a heightened sense of racial justice in the wake of the Second World War, liberal integrationists around the country embarked on grassroots campaigns seeking to translate the ideals of racial equality into a blueprint for genuine interracial living. Through innovative real estate efforts, creative marketing techniques, and religious activism, pioneering community groups worked to intentionally integrate their neighborhoods, to serve as a model for sustainable urbanity and racial justice in the United States. My research, centered on the northwest Philadelphia neighborhood of West Mount Airy, chronicles a liberal community effort that confronted formal legal and governmental policies and deeply entrenched cultural understandings; through this integration project, activists sought to redefine post-war urban space in terms of racial inclusion. In crafting such a narrative, I challenge much of the scholarship on the northern struggle for racial justice, which paints a uniform picture of a divisive and violent racial urban environment. At the same time, my dissertation explores how hard it was for urban integrationists to build interracial communities. I portray a neighborhood struggling with the deeper meanings of integrated space, with identity politics and larger institutional, structural, and cultural forces, and with internal resistance to change. In that sense, I speak to the larger debates over post-WWII urban space; my research, here, implies a cultural explanation complementing the political and economic narratives of white flight and urban crisis that scholars have crafted over the last two decades. This is at once the story of a group of people seeking to challenge the seeming inevitability of segregation by creating an economically stable, racially integrated community predicated upon an idealized vision of American democracy, and it is the story of the fraying of that ideal. / History

The value of Black students knowing about their history has been well-established within the scholarly literature on the teaching and learning of African American history. There is a paucity of empirical studies, however, that examine how exposure to this knowledge informs students’ historical and contemporary understandings. Framed by the theory of collective memory, the purpose of this study was to investigate how two teachers’ contrasting representations of African American history shaped student’ understanding of the Black past and its relationship to the experiences of Black Americans today. To examine this, I conducted an ethnographic study at two school sites that each required students to complete a year-long course on African American history. The participants in this study were two groups of Black high school students and their respective African American history teacher. Analysis of data derived from classroom observations, student and teacher interviews and curricular artifacts (e.g., reading materials, handouts, assessments and writing samples) indicate that teachers’ representations of African American history shaped students’ understandings in distinctive ways. This study contributes to the existing literature by examining students’ interpretations of the Black experience in relation to two teachers’ competing narratives on the meaning and significance of African American history. Findings from this study suggest that we must go beyond advocating for inclusion of African American history curricula and work toward ensuring this is being taught in a way that is relevant and meaningful for students. / Urban Education

The anti-colonial struggles in lusophone Africa were the most internationalized wars on the continent. Involved were people from across the globe and across the socioeconomic and political spectrums - Chinese Communists and Portuguese right-wing dictators, American black nationalists in the urban North and South African white supremacists, cold warriors and human rights activists. The Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO), was the only national liberation movement in the 1960s to receive aid from the United States, the Soviet Union, and the People's Republic of China. I contend that, because both FRELIMO and Portugal relied on support from the international community to wage war for over a decade (1964-1975), the anti-colonial wars in lusophone Africa were not only armed struggles, but also cultural and rhetorical battles. FRELIMO's program of socialist revolution which heralded human rights and social justice through education, non- racialism and gender equality resonated with the international shift to the left of the 1960s. Counterpoised were the Portuguese right-wing corporative dictatorship which espoused a "Lusotropical" civilizing mission for its African overseas provinces, and the white supremacist regimes of Southern Rhodesia and South Africa that militarily and economically dominated Southern Africa. This dissertation focuses particularly on the relationship between FRELIMO and the activists of the black freedom struggle and the New Left in the United States. It will show the significant contributions that American activists made to Mozambican liberation, as well as the impact that this transnational movement had on the entire Southern African region, on U.S. foreign policy, and on the United States' domestic social and political landscapes. I explore issues of colonialism, nationalism, and modernity within a cold war context using the lenses of race, class, and culture in the United States and southern Africa during the long Sixties. I also examine the significance of religious organizations and the moral imperative that underpinned the global advocacy supporting southern African independence. The development of a transnational network of activists that reached from rural Africa to the White House provided the leverage needed for southern Africans and their international allies to topple the Portuguese dictatorship and, eventually, end South African apartheid. / History

Battle of the Corner: Urban Policing and Rioting in the United States, 1943-1971 provides a national history of police reform and police-citizen conflicts in marginalized urban neighborhoods in the three decades after World War II. Examining more than a dozen cities, the dissertation shows how big-city police brass and downtown-friendly municipal elites in the late 1940s and 1950s attempted to professionalize urban law enforcement and regulate rank-and-file discretion through Police-Community Relations programs and novel stop-and-frisk preventive patrol schemes. These efforts ultimately failed to produce diligent yet impartial street policing. Beginning in the late 1950s, and increasing in severity and frequency until the early 1960s, young black and Latino working-class urban residents surrounded, taunted, and attacked police officers making routine arrests. These crowd rescues garnered national attention and prepared the ground for the urban rebellions of 1964 to 1968, many of which began with a controversial police incident on a crowded street corner. While telling a national story, Battle of the Corner provides deeper local context for postwar changes to street policing through detailed case studies highlighting the various stakeholders in reform efforts. In the 1950s and 1960s, African-American activists, block clubs, residents, and politicians pressured police for effective but fair and accountable tactical policing to check rising criminal violence and street disorder in neighborhoods increasingly blighted by urban renewal. Rank-and-file police unions fought civilian review boards and used new collective bargaining rights to stage job actions to obtain higher wages. They also obtained “bill of rights” contract provisions to shield members from misconduct investigations. Police management took advantage of newly-available federal and local resources after the riots to reorganize their departments into top-down bureaucratic organizations capable of conducting stop-and-frisk on a more systematic scale. By the early 1970s, a rising generation of urban black politicians confronted skyrocketing rates of criminal violence, armed militants intent on waging war on the police, and a politically-empowered rank-and-file angry and combative over the more intense threats and pressures they faced on the job. Battle of the Corner breaks ground in telling a national story of policing that juxtaposes elite decision-making and street confrontations and that analyzes a wide range of actors who held a stake in securing order and justice in urban neighborhoods. In chronicling how urban police departments emerged from the profound institutional crisis of the 1960s with greater power, resources, and authority, Battle of the Corner provides a history and a frame for understanding policing controversies today. / History

The war industries associated with World War II brought unparalleled employment opportunities for African Americans in California's port cities. Nowhere was this more evident than in San Francisco, a city whose African American population grew by over 650% between 1940 and 1945. With this population increase also came an increase in racial discrimination directed at African Americans, primarily in the employment and housing sectors. The situation would only get worse throughout the 1950s and 1960s as manufacturing jobs moved to the East Bay where race restrictive housing policies kept African Americans from moving with them. In San Francisco, most African Americans were effectively barred from renting or buying homes in all but a few neighborhoods, neighborhoods often characterized by dilapidated structures and over-crowded conditions. Except for the well educated and lucky, employment opportunities for African Americans were open only at or near entry levels for white collar positions or in unskilled and semi-skilled blue collar positions. Despite such challenges, San Francisco's African American population nearly doubled between 1950 and 1960. This community would push hard against the doors of discrimination and find that with concerted effort they would give way. During the 1960s and 1970s, civil rights groups formed coalitions to picket and protest thereby effectively expanding job opportunities and opening the housing market for African American San Franciscans. This dissertation examines the challenges and exigencies of San Francisco's growing African American community from the end of World War II through 1975. It describes and explains obstacles and triumphs faced and achieved in areas such as housing, employment, education and civil rights. No scholarship presently available presents as detailed an examination of San Francisco's post-Industrial African American population as does this work. It is not however, meant as a comparative study among Bay Area cities but rather narrowly focused study examining San Francisco's African American population to the exclusion of other Bay Area cities with sizable African American populations such as Oakland, Berkeley or Richmond. This dissertation also adds to the body of scholarship about the intersection of race and geography as it relates to the post-Industrial African American experience. / African American Studies

No description available.

The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which minority students in the Peralta Community College District in California, specifically, Merritt College have succeeded in gaining access to Merritt College and whether Merritt is providing needed remedial and other pertinent services/programs, necessary for the success of minority students enrolled in the institution. Merritt College in the Peralta Community College District was selected for this study because the Peralta District has a reputation for providing quality education along with innovative programs. A survey was designed in an attempt to ascertain students' perceptions of the importance and satisfaction with remedial and supportive services/programs that were available at Merritt College. The Statistical Package for the Social Science Computer Program was used to calculate FREQUENCIES, CROSSTABS and CHI SQUARES. The findings indicate that the majority of students felt open admission was very important or important in assisting students in accomplishing their goals. The findings also revealed that students felt that supportive services were important in community colleges. It was also indicated that students felt that it was important to have minority representation on the faculty and staff. The findings revealed that students were satisfied with the supportive services/programs and related work experience or internship programs at Merritt College.

In the cities of Richmond, Virginia; Charleston South Carolina; New Orleans, Louisiana; and Baltimore, Maryland, this dissertation endeavors to find out what can be learned about the archaeology(s) of Black memory(s) through Africological Epistemic Visual Storytelling (AEVS); their silences, their hauntings, their wake work, and their healing? This project is concerned with elucidating new African memories and African knowledges that emerge from a two-tier Afrocentric analysis of Eurocentric cartography that problematizes the dual hegemony of the colonial archive of public memory and the colonial map by using an Afrocentric methodology that deploys a Black Digital Humanities research design to create an African agentic ritual archive that counters the colonial one. Additionally, this dissertation explains the importance of understanding the imperial geographic logics inherent in the hegemonically quotidian cartographies of Europe and the United States that sanction white supremacist narratives of memory and suppress spatial imaginations and memories in African communities primarily, but Native American communities as well. It is the hope of the primary researcher that from this project knowledge will be gained about how African people can use knowledge gained from analyzing select monuments/sites of memorialization for the purposes of asserting agency, resisting, and possibly breaking the supposed correctness of the colonial map. / African American Studies

This thesis examines the social factors surrounding the development of Lindy Hop in Harlem, New York during the 1920s and 30s from a sociocultural perspective, applying the findings to an instance of contemporary Lindy Hop practice at Jazz Attack, a Lindy Hop venue in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in order to ascertain where elements of Black culture are present or absent. As Lindy Hop practice has transitioned from its point of origin in the Black space of the Savoy Ballroom to primarily white spaces today, questions arise about cultural preservation and erasure in this historically Black dance.Using historical methodologies, this research examines the human experience of historical Lindy Hop participants to analyze the culture that developed within the dance. Ethnographic methodologies, including the use of participant observation and interviews, are then used in a cross-cultural comparison to examine where elements of historical Black Lindy Hop culture are present or absent in an instance of contemporary Lindy Hop practice. The findings argue that, while the reasons for engagement in Lindy Hop are intrinsically different between historical and contemporary participants, elements of emotional or spiritual release and an emphasis on community are present today. Other historical Black cultural elements surrounding the approach to movement source creation and bodily aesthetics are minimal or absent. / Dance

No description available.