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On May 13, 1985, Philadelphians watched a live news broadcast as a police officer tossed a duffel bag full of plastic explosives onto the roof of an occupied rowhome in a Black, middle-class West Philadelphia neighborhood. The bombing and the decision to allow the fire to burn killed five children and six adults – all members of a controversial group called MOVE – and destroyed 61 rowhomes. This dissertation employs insights from memory studies, critical race theory and journalism practices to examine the ways in which an otherwise little-known event has been described and commemorated in Philadelphia over the past 35 years. It also considers the extent to which public understandings of the event have changed over time, with particular attention paid to which voices are privileged - and silenced - in the official narration of a complicated tragedy. To do so, this dissertation relies on: a series of interviews with journalists, officials, and others with firsthand knowledge of the event; critical discourse analysis of 35 years of local anniversary coverage of the bombing itself; and object studies of a related documentary, real-estate listings from the now-rehabilitated blocks in West Philadelphia; and a vast archive of material related to the city's official investigation into the events of May 13, 1985. It concludes with discussion of the ways in which the bombing is currently being invoked in protests against police brutality in spring of 2020 and an articulation of the ways in which authority over the memory of the MOVE bombing has been constructed to marginalize both MOVE members and the community in order to legitimize an official narrative that benefits city administrators and law enforcement. / Media & Communication

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Between 1795 and 1954 the Black Burghardt family, maternal relatives of international figure W. E. B. Du Bois, owned homes and land in Great Barrington, MA. This ownership included Du Bois from 1928 to 1954. The Black Burghardts did not originally choose to settle in Great Barrington; they were placed there by political, economic, and social forces beyond their control. Many, in this large family, used their property as a place of residence and as a site for household and even market oriented production. They also used the land as collateral for financial transactions. In the beginning of the 20th century, Du Bois sought to document the long history of his family in Great Barrington. At least six generations can be traced in the various public documents and family documents. Approaching the history of an African American family from the point of view of land ownership has little precedent. Few 18th and 19 th century houses owned and occupied by African Americans are known nor have they been extensively studied. There are even fewer sources which concentrate on land and house ownership by individual African American families in rural New England. This dissertation adds to the work started by Du Bois and offers insight into the meaning that home and land ownership had to an African American family in rural New England over a period of 150 years.

This dissertation departs from current literature that treats moral reform as a conservative force in American history by focusing on the political intent of black reform activity. My overall goal is to dissociate black reform efforts from “middle-class” thinking by describing how free blacks in Philadelphia and New York City sought political change through moral improvement. In chapters on literary societies, educated ministers, Sunday schools and apprenticeships, I demonstrate the relationship between moral reform and political action. My premise is that lacking political rights and access to more direct means of protest, free blacks embraced moral reform to achieve racial advancement, refusing to accept their inferior status. However, most historians do not regard moral reform as being a legitimate form of protest. In fact, antebellum black leaders often have been unfairly disparaged in the historical record for their nonviolent reform methods. This dissertation calls for a new paradigm that merges moral reform with violent “political” action without assigning worth to either approach. It ultimately reflects the need for historians to allow for less explicitly “political” forms of protest, especially among relatively powerless groups who were precluded from directly confronting authority. This dissertation also joins with a growing body of literature that questions the presumed conservatism of “middle-class” America. Since all social classes are historically constructed, they do not possess a predetermined or fixed politics.

This dissertation examines the evolution of early race relations in Boston during a period which saw the extinguishing of the progressive abolitionist racial flame and the triumph of Jim Crow in Boston. I argue that this historical moment was a window in which Boston stood at a racial crossroads. The decision to follow the path of disfranchisement of African Americans and racial polarization paved the way for the race relations in Boston we know and recognize today. Documenting the high number of blacks and whites who married in Boston during these years in the face of virulent anti-miscegenation efforts and the context of the intense political fight to keep interracial marriage legal, the dissertation explores the black response to this assault on the dignity and lives of African Americans. At the same time it documents the dilemma that the issue of intermarriage represented for black Bostonians and their leaders. African Americans in Boston cautiously endorsed, but did not actively participate in the Boston N.A.A.C.P.'s campaign against the resurgence of anti-miscegenation laws in the early part of the twentieth century. The lack of direct and substantial participation in this campaign is indicative of the skepticism with which many viewed the largely white organization. Boston, with its substantial Irish population, had a pattern of Irish, and other immigrant women, taking Negro grooms—perhaps because of the proximity within which they often worked and their differing notions about the taboo of race mixing. Boston was, for example, one of the most tolerant large cities in America with regard to interracial unions by 1900. In the period between 1900 and 1904, about 14 out of every 100 Negro grooms took white wives. Furthermore, black and white Bostonians cooperated politically to ensure that intermarriage remained legal throughout the nation.

This project examines the presence of African-derived spiritual ideals within the black literary tradition as a means of highlighting the fundamental influence of spirituality on communities of the modern black diaspora. I begin the discussion with an examination of traditional African spirituality, focusing on Nigerian author Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958). This discussion identifies four core principles of traditional African spirituality that resonate most thoroughly in diasporan communities: the interconnection of sacred and secular spheres, the concept of cyclical rather than linear time, the emphasis on a communal ethos, and the necessity for balance and reconciliation. I then examine the development of what I define as "Black Diasporan Spirituality," considering how these principles, resonating to varying degrees, constitute the basis for a philosophical system defining the universe and the place and role of mankind within it, as understood by African-descended peoples throughout the diaspora. Subsequently, I discuss the ways in which core elements of black spirituality at once inform and are represented in literature produced in Africa and the diaspora. Beginning with an analysis of James Weldon Johnson's God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1927) and Zora Neale Hurston's Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), I examine "Black Diasporan Spirituality" as a defining influence on the black oral tradition, centering my discussion on the cultural articulation of the African American song sermon. Using James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) and The Amen Corner (1954), I then examine the consequences of religious practice in the absence of black spiritual ideals. Focusing on the presence of spirituality in spaces which are not formally designated as religious, I then consider Gloria Naylor's Mama Day (1988) as a narrative that positions "Black Diasporan Spirituality" as vital to the healing processes of black communities, addressing both the trauma and the reconciliation inherent in the construction of diaspora. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that a clear understanding of the nature and character of black spirituality is essential to understanding not only the literature, but also the many circumstances—historical, social and cultural—of the communities out of which each text emerges.

This study considers how some African American women use their cultural production (e.g., fictional/non-fictional writings, films, prose, plays, comics, art, and music) to show how hair is central to their identity (re)construction. This study is multidisciplinary in its approach, and uses paradigms from Afro-American studies, Black feminist thought, cultural studies, feminism, literary studies, and performance studies in order to investigate the ways that African American women (re)negotiate hair and identity politics in the world. An important aspect of this study is that for such women, hair is a part of their identity that has a performative dimension. Performance studies provides an alternative perspective that allows some scholars to contemplate African American women's hair politics and identities in a space of critical validation, self-reflexivity, and celebration. The selected works which I consider in this study utilize "natural" hair politics and identity performances that challenge derogatory images of African American women in an effort to present a more realistic and self-defined (re)presentations of African American women and, in turn, deemphasize hegemonic ideas about aesthetics and identity. ^