This dissertation investigates the role of company executives‘ racial ideology in the relegation of black workers to inferior, lower paying jobs in the Pullman Railroad Company (1858-1969). I argue that it is important to recognize that employers, like white workers, were not driven simply by material interest; rather their actions were often guided by their ideologies and deep seated beliefs and prejudices. My argument that employers‘ racial ideology was a causal factor in black workers‘ marginalization is developed through a historical analysis of the Pullman Railroad Company archives.

This dissertation considers the role biography can play in analyses of past landscapes and, conversely, how those landscapes can help us better understand the lives of individuals. It focuses on one person, David Ruggles—a blind, African American, journalist, doctor, businessman, and antislavery activist—and a specific landscape, that of western Massachusetts during the mid-19th century. The questions that guide this dissertation concern the extent to which understanding past landscapes can reveal the previously unconsidered dimensions of the lives of people who experienced them. The landscape is considered through multiple scales in this dissertation. It draws on historical research as well as the modern-day Florence, Massachusetts landscape to reveal how Ruggles' experience was mediated by his race, physical ability, and social position. It also incorporates ethnographic data obtained from questionnaires and in-depth interviews to interrogate the role knowledge of local history plays in contemporary life. This research makes important methodological contributions to the field of historical archaeology. First, it demonstrates the utility of a biographical approach to analyses of the landscape and the past. Second, it highlights a dimension of the human past that is often overlooked in historical archaeology: the lives of people with disabilities. Third, in considering the life of a blind man, it recognizes that the landscape is experienced multi-sensorily and, furthermore, that the experience of walking through the landscape implicates one in a multitude of socio-historical processes that alter the landscape and influence the circumstances in which people interact. Finally, the ethnographic data reveal how knowledge about historical landscapes and the people who inhabited them come to be combined with contemporary experiences and interests to create new meanings and understandings.

In 1904, a wealthy black lawyer described Boston as “the paradise of the Negro”. With the state legislature having enacted and reinforced civil rights laws several times after the Civil War, African Americans in Massachusetts (over a third of whom lived in Boston in 1900) could enjoy the same political, civil, and social rights as whites by the turn of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, the economic conditions of most black Bay Staters did not change much. They were confined as ever to menial jobs, and, unlike European immigrants, had little possibility for upward mobility. As one black porter in Boston said, blacks “are given…the work that white folks don't want”. Owing to the civil rights acts, they could “go most anywhere with the white man…and spend [their] dollar”, but they could not “go anywhere with the white man and earn it”. This study attempts to elucidate how African-American leaders in post-bellum Boston defined racial “equality”. It examines class-consciousness of black “elites” and points out their tendency to distance themselves from the masses. Having sincere faith in the doctrine of equal opportunity and laissez-faire, “elite” black Bostonians believed that the “fittest”, regardless of color, should survive in the world of competition. And in the process of uplifting themselves and identifying with the white elite and its values, these college-educated, light-skinned “aristocrats of color” came to view the lower classes of their own race as different and inferior. Proud of acquiring their present status by themselves, they only advocated equality before the law and did almost nothing else but urge the masses to work hard enough to uplift themselves just like they had done, dismissing those who could not as either idle or without ambition. The dissertation concludes that although intended as a weapon against racism color-blind meritocracy advocated by the black “elites” turned into an ideology for the status-quo. By demanding equal opportunity alone in an overtly discriminatory society, “elite” leaders not only failed to ease but in fact unwittingly fostered the ever-increasing oppression against African Americans in Boston after the Civil War.

This dissertation reports on the research related to childhood growth and sex ratios of the children from the Eighteenth century New York African Burial Ground (NYABG) cemetery population. NYABG is the largest archaeological cemetery population of enslaved Africans in North America. A total of 349 individuals comprise the baseline sample for the construction of stationary paleodemographic tables. One hundred ninety-six individuals under 25 years of age comprise the sub-sample for which analyses related to questions regarding childhood sex ratio, growth status, and childhood labor are undertaken. A morphological technique for sexing immature skeletons is tested for the first time in this project. The results of this test are then utilized in the construction of the sex ratio composition for this segment of the NYABG. Growth is assessed by examining stature estimates and standardized long bone lengths for individuals in relation to skeletal indicators of biomechanical stress, generalized pathologies, and major indicators of nutritional status. Research questions related to the life experiences of these children in a colonial slave regime are explored by incorporating historical information and the results of the analysis of growth and development and sex ratio structure within a biocultural framework. This framework integrates modes of production, as put forth by Wolf (1982), to increase the explanatory dimensions of the biocultural theoretical model.

This dissertation explores execution literature, a genre of literature popular in the Northeastern American colonies and successor states. The texts I explore are written between 1693 and 1817 and feature people of African descent. There are three types of texts that make up execution literature; execution sermons, written and delivered by pastors written especially for the condemned immediately before his or her execution, last words, autobiographical texts taken from the prisoner's own mouth immediately before death, and dying verse, rhyming poetry written on occasion of the execution of the criminal. Although execution literature can provide a wealth of information, it has tended to be excluded from consideration as a means of discovering more about the experiences of people of African descent by the popularity of Slave Narratives. Whereas enslaved men and women including Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Mary Prince and William and Ellen Craft are well known and their lives well represented in secondary literature, Joseph Hanno, Mark, Phillis, John Joyce and Peter Matthias among others are noticeably absent from the scholarship. Additionally, I argue that Puritans and their descendants were, as Robin Blackburn puts it, “ethno-religious exclusivists.” To refer to Puritans as racists is historically inaccurate. Biological racism as an ideology was invented later, with the advent of the institution of chattel slavery. Puritans and their descendants held a different worldview, reflected in execution literature. They believed themselves to be the direct descendants of the ancient Hebrews of the Bible. The Massachusetts Bay Colony was New Israel, and here they attempted to align their lives as closely with Biblical precedent as possible. The Bible, especially the New Testament, emphasized that people ought to be less concerned with their earthly condition than with their eternal destination. One never knew when he or she would die; therefore it was of the utmost importance to spend one's life preparing for judgment. The significance of execution literature is not in its relationship to other genres of literature written by and about people of African descent. Instead, the literature itself provides a wealth of information that has not been explored to the full.

This dissertation examines the American Colonization Society’s “scheme” which sought to deport black Americans to Liberia during the period of slavery. It also explains why a significant number of free African Americans in the North struggled to undermine the colonization movement. The questions that drive this study are: How did African American leaders utilize antislavery networks in the Atlantic world to challenge racial oppression and the colonization movement? How did black political discourse imbibe and reconfigure western concepts like nationalism? In what ways did African Americans foster transnational relationships with European reformers to undermine the colonization movement, the Atlantic slave trade, and the moral and religious implications of human bondage? While historians continue to study African Americans who left America, and settled in Liberia, few studies have been dedicated to examining the overwhelming opposition to black expatriation. My dissertation will attempt to fill this void, and to explore the origins of the colonization movement, and the various ways free African Americans in the North protested against it. This study also places anti-colonization ideology, rhetoric, and activism within the broader Abolition Movement by clarifying how black opposition to colonization set the groundwork for the “Immediatism” phase of antislavery agitation. Through protesting the colonization movement, black leaders sought to demonstrate that African Americans, and their kin in the diaspora, were afforded the same intellectual acumen, moral worth, and human faculties as their European American peers. Furthermore, they employed diverse strategies to challenge racial inequality, affirm their American identity, and critique American democracy. Black American critics of racial prejudice, slavery, and all manifestations of white supremacy, expressed a sense of African pride, while rooting their struggle against the Colonization Society within the belief that America would one day accept them as equal citizens. While the history of the American Colonization Society, and black resistance to their African colonization initiative, fits squarely within antebellum United States history, the topic crosses temporal and spatial boundaries, thus provoking researchers to consider the implications of Africa American agency and formation of a Pan-African worldview during the nineteenth century. Through black resistance to colonization, one can glean an important analytical framework for examining black nationalism and African diasporic identity.

The purpose of this study is to gather and present biographies on afro-american female scientists and inventors to be used in interdisciplinary units of core curriculum. Black female students without the benefit of experiencing black female scientist and inventor role models during their school career, lack appropriate modeling for choosing careers in the fields of science and technology. The youngsters are therefore underrepresented in professional science careers and are usually relegated to low paying jobs and poor self esteem. The development of these biographies of black female inventors has shown that black women have historically always had a strong committment to science and inventive technology in America. Yet, there is a lack of discussion about these women. It is as though they never existed. It is also noted, through the biographical interviews, that black women have not relied on white support of themselves in their science and technology careers for they have understood that not to be included has been a political statement made by the state and the nation about their being. What has been uncovered in these biographical statements is not new to the women themselves. Invisible dignity, unshouted courage, and quiet grace have been the attributes utilized to encourage each to find meaning in her life and to create something where nothing was before. To arrest this incomplete educational tragedy, a sample interdisciplinary curriculum guide utilizing the biographical profiles of one of the women has been developed in order to offer educators examples of appropriate curriculum development for black female students. It is generally agreed that the differential representation between black females and persons of other racial and gender groups in the scientific community is especially presaged by educational patterns at the elementary and secondary levels. Schools simply are not offering role models for these youngsters to bond with. It is expected then that this study, designed especially to be used at the elementary and middle school levels, will be a beginning tool for promoting change in an usable and exciting manner.

Settlement workers sought to reform American society in order to make it truer to its democratic ideals. They erected the seedling of modern social work, the social settlement, which uniquely combined social services and reform. Attentive to the daily concerns of their neighbors, settlement workers aimed at nothing short of total social transformation based on the revitalization of local communities. However, when black migrants from the rural South began to replace European immigrants in settlement neighborhoods during and after World War I, settlements responded by closing down completely, following their white neighbors out of the slums, conducting segregated activities, or only rarely, opening a separate branch or an independent black branch. This dissertation seeks to explain the failure of the mainstream movement to redirect its efforts toward the needs of its new black neighbors. It analyzes many settlement leaders' belief in the amorality of black individuals and the deficiency of their culture. Settlement workers attempted to put into practice what they considered a cosmopolitan world view, yet its secular, urban, and Northern biases further inhibited their understanding of black culture and religion. Their "liberalism" ironically helped stall the translation of "the settlement idea" from immigrants to blacks. While the mainstream settlement movement failed to welcome blacks, other reformers did conduct settlement work in both urban and rural black communities in the North and South. School settlements, the YWCA, and independent black settlements all embodied the settlement's marriage of social services and community revitalization. Some of this work influenced the broader movement toward civil rights and State responsibility for social welfare. Innocuous doctrines like industrial education and moralist womanhood veiled serious commitments to social change. This study describes a reform movement plagued and directed by racial tension. It provides evidence of the great impact of race on the history of the settlement movement from the Progressive Era to the 1940s, and reveals the importance of collective confrontation of issues such as racism and separatism in all efforts to bring about change in a pluralistic society.

This thesis interrogates how Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes represents histories of violence ethically by utilizing Emmanuel Lévinas’s philosophy of ethics as a methodology for interpretation. Traditional slave narratives like Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography and postmodern neo-slave narratives like Toni Morrison’s Beloved animate the violence endemic to slavery and colonialism in an effort to emphasize struggles in conscience, the incomprehensible atrocities, and strategies of rebellion. However, this project illustrates how The Book of Negroes supplements these literary goals with Hill’s own imagination of how slaves contested the inhumanities thrust upon them. Through his aesthetic choices as a realist, Hill foregrounds the possibilities of pacifism, singular identities, and altruistic agency through his protagonist Aminata Diallo. These three narrative elements constitute Lévinas’s ethical peace, which means displaying a profound sensitivity towards the historical Other whom imperial discourses and traditional representations of catastrophes in Black history might obscure. / Graduate / 0325 / 0328 / 0352 / jaslife12@hotmail.com

The Great Migration is the largest self-initiated movement of Black Americans in United States history. By leaving behind the rural areas which were familiar but offered little or no opportunities for advancement out of poverty and journeying to major urban centers, Blacks were able to exercise their individual and collective agency. Many thousands of Black Southerners chose to remain below the Mason-Dixon line: the populations of Atlanta, Houston, and New Orleans swelled during the 1910s and through the 1930s, due largely to an influx of Blacks from other areas of the South. These stories often get lost among the millions of other records about migration to the North. New Orleans offered an enticing compromise between remaining in rural poverty and relocating thousands of miles from home: Black Louisianans could stay relatively close to loved ones while gaining new opportunities for employment and economic stability. Furthermore, the city’s vibrancy and reputation for Black solidarity and community support helped draw those who sought to escape the race-based violence of the Jim Crow countryside. Lastly, New Orleans’ Black neighborhoods had always been and continued to act as hotbeds of cultural evolution, and in areas such as the Tremé and Central City, it was easy to find others who shared similar backgrounds and values. Louisiana’s Great Migration helped stimulate Black culture within New Orleans and across the nation.