This project examines the politics of education, culture and black community formation in Roxbury, MA during the postwar era. Elma Lewis was active in Boston’s black community for more than half a century and through her work as educator, cultural worker and institution builder helped shape the spatial and ideological contours of Boston’s black community throughout the postwar period. Her early commitment to institution building supported the development of cultural networks that facilitated the large-scale organization and mobilization of Boston’s black residents during the 1960s and 1970s in the struggle for educational equality. She founded a school, a national arts organization and a museum, each of which fostered the emergent sense of black community culminating in calls for community control, black power and cultural pride during the later period. She was a bridge activist who established and developed cultural institutions that helped transcend social, ideological and generational divisions within Boston’s black community.

In this dissertation I examine the discursive nature of urban renewal discourses in Springfield, Massachusetts, with a womanist method known as emancipatory historiography. Womanism, a theoretical and analytical framework that emerged in the 1980s in recognition of Alice Walker’s famous declaration that “womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender (Walker 1983), was established, in part, as a response to the failure of white feminists to be in solidarity with black women in the fight for racial and socio-economic justice. This emancipatory method, proposed by womanist Katie G. Cannon (Cannon 1995) provides a critical paradigm for rethinking the communicative nature of urban renewal planning in a local context. My intention is not to pick apart the technical aspects of urban renewal, as would a rigid examination of costs, benefits or disparities associated with local urban renewal. Rather, the purpose of this project is to carefully explore planning narratives in an effort to dislodge assumptions about the discourses, storylines or narratives that accompanied urban renewal documents in Springfield during the 1960s and 70s. The recovery of local urban renewal documents, which have gone unexamined for decades, presents the opportunity to recontextualize and reconstruct the discursive parameters of planning for the local Negro community that was displaced by urban renewal. This historical-critical womanist study of planning documents written from 1960–1980 provides the building blocks for rewriting local planning history from a standpoint that takes into account the intersectional and dialectical nature of race, place, and gender. A critique of whiteness, as an epistemological or analytical framework, is an underlying aspect of this project. The following four questions provide a basis for examining the thematic or discursive foundations of urban renewal planning material that was relative to the local Negro population. The questions that are considered in this dissertation are: (1) whose experience was validated in urban renewal documents; (2) what groups were left out of local planning discourses; (3) what ideologies or epistemologies accompanied neighborhood planning discourses; and, (4) what central logic or framework held them all together? Keywords: planning history and theory; urban renewal; womanist and feminist studies; whiteness studies; ethnic and area studies.

This dissertation pinpoints imaginative patterns that people within the diaspora have used and now use to navigate highly untenable domestic circumstances. In focusing on this aspect of psychological survival, we can trace domestic behaviors back to existential questions that trouble individuals in the New World African Diaspora: questions of self-knowledge amidst internalized racism, questions that seek to realign one's history and future after migration, questions about the colonial and personal mother. These types of questions which frame my examination of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Loida Maritza Pérez's Geographies of Home and Andrea Levy's Small Island, direct us toward psychic and physical tensions that preoccupy Black Women writers and their characters. In the second chapter of this dissertation, my textual analysis of The Bluest Eye engages with how Morrison orders an existential logic of a young girl's development through her experience with private violation and public racial violence. In the third chapter, I argue that Loida Maritza Pérez's Geographies of Home is an examination of the psychologies of a mother and her daughters, as revealed by the omniscient narrator, which discloses the complex interplay of illusion/reality, inward turn/outward turn, belief/unbelief which characterizes the immigrant's uncertain survival. In my fourth chapter, Andrea Levy's Small Island, two Jamaicans, Hortense and Gilbert grow up in early twentieth century, colonial Jamaica and later immigrate to WWII England. Through these two characters, Levy demonstrates how the dynamic of the existential uncertainty inherent in the colonial relationship consistently holds in tension two important concepts: help and humiliation. Ultimately, I assert that recognizing existential uncertainty in the New World African Diaspora not only highlights the acute sense of unpredictability that plagues African American, Caribbean and Black British individuals, but points to a genealogy of psychic oppression that persists for these people groups. This dissertation calls for a witnessing of a family's traumatic history in a way that envisions the future healing and reconciliation of psychic wounds. This project expands scholarship on the harrowing psychic genealogies that link African-American, Caribbean and Black British domestic environments and establishes a relevant existential vocabulary for diasporic experiences of violence, wounding and self-questioning.

Land restitution is acclaimed as a political-economic strategy to mend land dispossession. However, land restitution policies lacking an understanding of the history of land property rights and the conditions of inequality under which it is distributed may produce new forms of uprooting, and reconfigure dimensions of class, gender and racial inequality. This research explores how current loss of territories of Afrocolombian community councils is grounded in a long history of exploitation, racism, (hetero) patriarchy, and deracination. I study the persistent mechanisms that account for the uprooting of Afrocolombian rural populations, and the strategies of resistance people pursue. I use a qualitative methods approach. I analyze archival documents such as letters of freedom, alcabalas , and receipts of manumission, land reform, and manumission laws; conduct interviews, make short term immersions in the disputed territories; and scrutinize testaments, maps, and public policy documents. I investigate the ways in which land has been distributed since 1851, when slavery came to an end in Colombia, and the extent to which restorative justice can occur with the 1448/2011 Colombian victims' reparation, and land restitution law without addressing land distribution inequality.

This dissertation investigates the radical black feminist theatre of the 1940s through the 1970s, focusing on the work of playwrights Alice Childress, Lorraine Hansberry, and Sonia Sanchez. Each of these artists critically intervened in the discourses of gender, race, and class during the civil rights movement, and, later, the Black Power and Arts movements. Using archival and historical research, I argue that there was a vibrant, radical black feminist theatre movement throughout the twentieth century that sought equal representation for African Americans and a voice for black women. Chapters Two and Three add to the growing body of scholarship that situates Alice Childress as a major figure within the black left and the Communist Party. Through archival research and readings of her work, I demonstrate how Childress scripted dignified, humorous, and realistic portrayals of working class black women. Childress illustrated the theory of "triple jeopardy," the idea circulated within black radical circles that working class African American women were triply oppressed due to their class, race, and gender. Through her experimental forms and daring content, Childress revised racist stereotypes of, for instance, the black female domestic worker, into full-fledged characters. The manner in which African Americans were represented—artistically and politically—was her greatest concern. In Chapter Two, I argue that Childress's body of work can be viewed as an alternative feminist chronicle of African American women through its scripting of the working class black woman, specifically in her play Florence (1949) and her experimental novel of monologues, Like One of the Family (1956). Childress wrote, "I concentrate on portraying the have-nots in a have society, those seldom singled out by mass media, except as source material for derogatory humor." Her focus on the ordinary is anti-bourgeois in its refusal to participate in racial uplift stories lionizing the successful black middle class. In Chapter Three, I focus on Trouble in Mind. While this play has been hitherto regarded as formally conservative, I argue that, to the contrary, Childress uses innovative Brechtian structures. Childress employs radical formal experimentation to forcefully argue for black self-determination in the arts, well before the artists of the Black Arts Movement would. Chapter Four, "The White Problem: White Supremacy and Black Masculinity in the Work of Lorraine Hansberry," focuses on Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun and Les Blancs and the playwright's critical interventions into the racial discourses of whiteness, black masculinity, and their intersections, in the civil rights era. By focusing on Hansberry's critique of whiteness and patriarchal white supremacy, this essay redresses a gap in scholarship on Hansberry. I argue that Hansberry was one of the central assessors of whiteness and black masculinity in the civil rights-era United States. Hansberry's representation of black men across her career attempts to find common ground for progressive black masculinity and black feminism to work together to defeat the white supremacist patriarchy detrimental to all African Americans. Moving into the Black Power era, my final chapter posits an alternative model to current scholarship on gender ideology within the Black Arts and Power movements. Rather than envisioning a movement led by men who repressed women, or considering women as marginal figures fighting from the periphery to address questions of feminism, gender, women's issues, and sexuality, I ask, what happens if we center such feminist concerns in our narrative of the Black Arts Movement? Using works by Alice Childress and Sonia Sanchez, I demonstrate that black feminists in this time not only critiqued the masculinist rhetoric of much Black Arts writing, but also proposed a community-centered alternative model of black nationalism. This feminist model was grounded in love and support between black women and men, and advanced by black feminists as imperative for the success of the black nation's political goals.

The primary purpose of this study was to explore social perceptions among African-American community college transfer students at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, a predominantly white institution. A secondary purpose to pictorialize students' social perceptions through a series of storyboards. The methodology for this study was qualitative, and required in-depth interviewing to explore the social perceptions of participating students. Once the interviewing process was complete, the individual profiles of participating students' were developed and grouped into categories that reveal thematic connections. Consistent with research on Black students at predominantly White colleges universities, this study reveals that the extent to which African-American community college transfer students become integrated into the academic and social communities of a campus environment is affected by a number of social adjustment issues. Included among these adjustment issues are conflicts involving: (a) racial identity development; (b) orientation to the campus environment; (c) peer relationships; (d) perceptions of racism in the classroom; (e) racial stereotyping; (f) cultural prejudice; (g) self-segregation on campus; (h) faculty-student interactions; and (i) family encouragement and support. From the personal narratives of students who, for the purposes of this study, were identified as the “Main Characters,” pictorials or graphic illustrations of their social perceptions and experiences were developed into storyboards. While the students' personal narratives allowed them to tell their stories in their own words, th storyboards were the researcher's attempt to provide a visual interpretation of students' social perceptions and experiences within the campus environment. Quite often, in a predominantly white college environment, the social perceptions and experiences of African-American students are invisible to those who are responsible for enrollment management or the quality of campus life. Therefore, the fundamental premise behind the development of the storyboards as an illustrative analysis of the research data is that “seeing is believing.”

Jarena Lee, Zilpha Elaw, and Julia Foote use spiritual autobiography as a platform from which to promote women's preaching. They consider race, gender and social circumstances as elements in their spiritual development. Their narratives contain a "radical" vision of nineteenth-century African American women. As sites of intensive intellectual and spiritual wrangling over social and spiritual matters, the narratives cannot be fully understood without carefully contextualization. This study suggests that (1) understanding the histories of the communities, churches, and evangelical missions, (2) considering style, syntax, vocabulary, and tone, and (3) asking specific questions of each text, will help readers gain a sense of the intellectual and spiritual lives documented in the narratives. The "dying husband" trope appears in all of the texts. The trope begins with a detailing of a period of great spiritual joy achieved after the writer has overcome spiritual challenge. Joy is interrupted by marriage, usually to a non-believer. Marriage presents physical and spiritual hardship attended by debilitating illness. Illness and near-death debilitation become occasions for preaching liberty and divine revelation. Generally, once revealed truths are understood, a husband dies. In light of new understandings of personal power and divine inspiration, the widowed preacher resumes her evangelical charge to pursue anew her "call". Lee's 1836 and 1849 texts offer direct challenge to A.M.E. leaders set on licensing only educated men as clergy. Her texts are extended arguments for a sex-integrated and "inspired" pastorate. Elaw's work, not arguing directly for women preachers, implies that she has been groomed for evangelical service, as was St. Paul. Critiquing more pointedly the idea that women could not be spiritual leaders, Foote wages battle with the A.M.E. Zion Church over the right of women to preach sanctification. Foote's argument for women's preaching relies on her use of Dred Scott v. Sanford (1879) case dicta with which she indicts the Church as sexist in the same way slavery law and public policy were racist. Black feminist literary criticism must incorporate methodology that permits an appropriate contextualization for texts sensitive to significant cultural and social change, such as these texts.

The need for professional equality in this country has been long recognized by many historical and influential public officials. Over the decades much blood has been shed and tremendous resources have been utilized to ascertain equality for all American citizens in the workplace. Agencies have been established and laws have been passed (such as The Civil Rights Act; Affirmative Action; and others) to cement this principle into our way of life. An often quoted and written Equal Employment Opportunity statement, such as the following: "It is the policy of (whatever company or institution) not to discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment because of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, handicap, or political affiliation. The (whatever company or institution) shall take affirmative action to insure that applicants are employed and that employees are treated fairly during employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, or handicap. Such action shall include, but not be limited to, the following: recruiting, employment, training, assignment, transfer, career development, and promotion of minorities, women, and handicapped will be addressed at all levels of employment ... " (Springfield Public Schools Affirmative Action Plan, 5/22/87), vskip18pt contributes to the perception that there is equal access and opportunity in the professional world. Consequently, it is perceived that women settle in beside their male counterparts at the top. However, this perception has never been converted to reality in a noticeable way. The imbalance between women and men is certainly a problem in and of itself, but the focus of this dissertation is on the imbalance of African American women in public school administration. This imbalance exists in all community types. If we, African American females, do not rise to the occasion and unite our forces to aggressively combat this inequality, we will become "endangered species" in public school administration. This study evaluates in depth the statistical imbalances of African American females in public school administration. Through in depth interviews, the experiences of influential African American females in education and other professions are analyzed to more fully understand the problem and how these prominent individuals dealt with it. The final goal of this study is to develop an innovative "Network" which focuses on making it easier for young African American females in middle and high school who have a desire to work public education.

This study investigated African American males' perceptions and attitudes toward women and rap music. One hundred males between the ages of 13–25 were given a survey to assess their perceptions of women and rap music. Upon completion of the survey, five participants were randomly chosen to be interviewed. Four research questions guided the analysis: (1) How do young African American males respond to the images of women in rap music? (2) How do young African American males perceive manhood? (3) How do young African American males perceive heterosexual relationships? (4) How do young African American males perceive rap music and their relationship with women? The major findings of this study offered a complex, multi-faceted view of the role of rap music in the lives of young African American males including its impact on their attitudes toward women. Despite images of violence and sexual conquest in many popular rap songs, participants in the study affirmed a personal view of manhood that includes a rejection of violence against women. Participants also rejected a view of male-female relationships built on sexual relations in favor of more mutually supportive relationships with women. Participants also overwhelmingly rejected views of women as “gold diggers” interested in men for material gains. Participants further rejected a view of rap music as a form of personal and social control. They viewed it as a form of entertainment and escapism that offers African Americans opportunities for expression that are necessary to resist influences of a larger racist society.

Several studies have been conducted on the features of African-American English (AAE). Findings have generally been limited to descriptions of those surface level features used by adult or adolescent AAE speakers. Little emphasis has been placed on how AAE emerges as a linguistic system in young children. Consequently, much of the information gained on AAE surface features are limited to lists of how AAE features used by adults and teenagers contrast with those used by speakers of Standard American English (SAE). There has been limited information gathered on the underlying grammatical and syntactic principles of AAE. An informed perspective is that in order to differentiate normal language functioning from disordered language functioning in AAE speaking children, there is the need for a greater understanding of the underlying linguistic systems governing the functioning of AAE grammar. This research investigation represents a step in understanding the linguistic systems of AAE which govern its surface level representations. The purpose of this study was to investigate AAE speaking children's knowledge of the specific aspectual properties that comprise the meaning of aspectual "be" in AAE. These linguistic properties included: habituality, iterativity, imperfective viewpoint, and the marker "be." Thirty-five normal AAE speaking children and eighteen normal SAE speaking children served as subjects. The children were between the ages of five and six years. The results of this study confirmed that AAE speaking children understand the targeted aspectual contours of aspectual "be" and do not confuse aspectual "be" with SAE regular forms of "be," but rather are able to identify aspectual "be" as a separate additional lexical item (marking specific aspectual contours) in their linguistic repertoires. Findings also revealed that AAE speaking subjects could correctly manipulate aspectual "be" in the deep structure of their grammar. Finally, it was demonstrated that with the exception of aspectual "be," AAE and SAE children share essentially equivalent aspectual abilities. The AAE subjects' ability to recognize two separate linguistic meanings of "be" (regular and aspectual) provided clear evidence that at a young age AAE speaking children are able to control the subtle features of their dialect.