Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2008. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-11, Section: A, page: 4462. Adviser: James R. Barrett. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 336-369) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

In 1959, Christopher Oliana and Walter “Serge” King took a historic journey to pre-revolutionary Cuba that would change the religious trajectory of numerous African Americans, particularly in New York City. They became the first African American initiates into the Afro-Cuban Lucumi orisha tradition opening the way for generations of African Americans who would comprehensively transform their way of life. This dissertation examines the inter-diasporic exchanges between African Americans and their Cuban teachers to highlight issues of African diasporic dissonance and differing notions of “blackness” and “African.” I argue that these African Americans create a particular African American Lucumi religious subjectivity within the geographical space of an urban cosmopolitan city as they carve out space and place in the midst of religious intolerance and hostility. The intimate study of these devotees’ lives contributes new understandings about the challenges of religious diversity within contemporary urban settings. These African Americans cultivated a new religious subjectivity formed through dialogical mediation with spiritual entities made present through material religious technologies, such as divination, spiritual masses, and possession. Through the lens of lived religion, I examine the experiences of African American Lucumi devotees to better understand how their everyday lives reflect the mediation between a private religious life, defined and structured by spiritual entities, and their public lives in the contemporary sociocultural, economic and political context of urban American society. Based on more than 8 years of intense participant observation and semi-structured interviews and discussions, I analyze how religious subjectivities and religious bodies are cultivated as these African Americans leave their mark on this religious tradition, their geographical surroundings, and African American religious history. / African and African American Studies

This dissertation explores the attempts of Africans, both enslaved and free, to create and maintain families in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New England. It makes sense of a remarkable array of historical actors: men like Thomas Bedunah, who plotted a surprising course for his descendants when he chose a spouse of English descent; women like Cuba Vassall, who let her husband secure her firmly in bondage at the very moment the region’s blacks were being freed en masse; and a pair like Mark and Phoebe, who fed their master porridge laced with “Potter’s Lead” in hopes that his death would enable them to find owners closer to their distant families. Pulling together thousands of fragments of evidence, this dissertation contextualizes the everyday lives and beleaguered intimacies of these Africans and many others, revealing patterns in their living situations, gendered relationships, and kin communities that historians have never before recognized. At the same time, the project advances historical arguments related to a range of issues, from the relationship between family and freedom in early New England to the influence of patriarchy on enslaved kin groups in Anglo-America. The project sets forth methodological arguments as well. Contending that historical method has an important bearing on the ability of scholars to understand and portray slaves as fully human, with complete life spans and complicated contexts, “Endearing Ties” makes a case for the importance of reconstructing the lives and trajectories of enslaved individuals in great depth, despite the archival challenges that such an undertaking inevitably entails. / History

This dissertation, a study of one strand of French exoticism, discusses the representation and reception of the Black African and Caribbean Other, both of whom the French called the “nègre,” from the Great War until 1930. Using a wide array of sources (novels, travelogues, advertisements, and photographs), I argue that representations of the nègre, from French West Africa and the Antilles were constructed ambivalently in the French social imagination to define boundaries of the French self and to mediate cultural changes and social anxieties that World War I had furthered. In Part I, I demonstrate how the Black African came to be represented as a grand enfant in popular culture during and after the Great War. This representation set the stage for the emergence of négrophilisme in the 1920s and for some romantic mixed-race relationships. But the grand enfant was a contested representation, and this dissertation shows that a battle to define the post-war “Black soul” broke out after René Maran, a Black Frenchman, published his novel, Batouala (1921). In Part II, I analyze how the French depicted the Black African as the Other in “ethnographic” exhibitions, photographs, and advertisements. In the 1920s, the French represented the Black African as an exotic, primitive “type” in efforts to define post-war moral and social identities. In Part III, I examine three French travelers to Africa. Writers Lucie Cousturier and André Gide demonstrate a limited French conception of extending fraternity to the Other and a reluctance to embrace the “oceanic” in Africa. Popular response to La Croisière noire, an automobile expedition through Africa, serves as the basis of my analysis of heroic exoticism. Last, I examine French exoticist desires at the Bal nègre, a dance hall where ethno-eroticism and carnivalesque mixing of races flourished. Some contemporary observers, like writer Paul Morand, feared fluidity across the color line. Morand's exoticism is invoked to demonstrate how négrophilisme and négrophobisme became intertwined in the French social imagination in the 1920s. Thus this dissertation offers a complex account of French history that problematizes the myth of a non-racist France.

This dissertation examines the circumstances created by colonial encroachments in the American Upper Ohio Valley and the South African Eastern Cape. Beginning in the second half of the eighteenth and lasting well into the mid-nineteenth century, American Indians and Africans in the two areas faced increasing intrusions by people of European origin. Colonialism, the encounter between alien cultures, infringements on homelands, violence, dispossession, decimation, cultural invasion, removal, accommodation, revitalization, and survival led to rapidly changing worlds for local populations and white colonizers. My comparative study highlights the similarities and differences between historical developments in the two regions, with a particular focus on the creations of colonial racial orders in the United States and South Africa. Comparative history is a valuable method for examining phenomena of cross-cultural significance while subverting any notions about an area's historical uniqueness. It is an especially helpful approach in understanding the significant roles that the institutionalization of colonial expansion, racism and racial domination played in the United States and South Africa. The Upper Ohio Valley and the Eastern Cape functioned in many ways as testing grounds for American and British expansion. Developments in each place contributed to the making of colonial racial systems in the larger United States and greater southern Africa. While the scenarios in the Upper Ohio Valley and the Eastern Cape did not repeat themselves identically in other locations, comparable patterns would emerge in later years as the United States expanded westward and Britain expanded into southern and eastern Africa. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth century in the Upper Ohio Valley and the South African Cape, systems of racial exclusiveness became entrenched through increasingly close ties between settlers and the state. In both places, settlers, indigenous groups, missionaries and humanitarians attempted to influence the emerging colonial racial orders with varying success. Yet ultimately, it was the power of the state with its ability to defeat indigenous groups militarily, to dispossess and move, and to legislate, which shaped the two regions' colonial racial orders.

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.

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.

Jacksonville has Florida's largest African American community. It is a city with a long and prosperous history characterized by tense but generally amicable race relations. This dissertation explores the political, social and economic problems facing Jacksonville's Black community during the crucial World War II thru 1970s period. Heavy emphasis is placed on the Black community's political activities. It is divided into ten chapters each covering an important period, event, or character in African American community. / It provides a link between the 1920s and 1980s period which have already been studied. It investigates the challenges faced by Blacks leaders in their struggle to elect a candidate to office. It uncovers some of the people left out of most Black histories of the city. The most important contribution this work makes is that it introduces you to a world which was generally ignored by the White community. It attempts to introduce Blacks as a human beings who were struggling against almost insurmountable odds, for simple things, such as equal treatment and a chance at a decent education. / Because Jacksonville's Black community was so large it could band together and protect itself from some of the worse abuses which Blacks in other communities endured. Because the community had a prosperous African American middle class it was able to supply the people with the economic base necessary for social survival and could band together and protect itself from some of the worse abuses which Blacks in other communities endured. Because the community had a prosperous African American middle class it was able to supply the people with the economic base necessary for social survival and economic prosperity. This work also looks at the impact the civil rights movement had on Jacksonville's African American community. It answers the question, "what part did Jacksonville's Blacks community play and who were some of the leaders?" / The two most controversial sections deal with the 1967 election and the elections of Mary Singleton and Sally Mathis to the city council and also the struggle over consolidation and its impact on Jacksonville's African American community. After 1967, Jacksonville's African American community found itself on the verge of political domination. Consolidation proved to be a very controversial subject because if consolidation passed, Blacks would be reduced from 43% of the city's population to just over 27%. However, the city would be armed with the financial resources necessary to handle future crisis. / The work concludes with a look at Earl Johnson and Frank Hampton arguably the two most important political figures in recent Jacksonville history. It explores their contributions to building Jacksonville and the part they played in ensuring Black political participation. The last section provides an overview and also a comparative look at the Black communities in Jacksonville and other major Florida cities. It compares infant mortality rates, death rates, poverty rates, and other important figures to see how Jacksonville's, Black community compares. The results are startling. Statistically, Jacksonville had the most healthiest, and prosperous Black community in Florida. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 55-09, Section: A, page: 2952. / Major Professor: Neil Betten. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1994.

As soon as they were emancipated, freedmen established schools. Their resources were limited and assistance came from the North. When representatives of the American Missionary Association (AMA) arrived in Macon, Georgia, in December 1865, they quickly established a teachers "Home" and arranged to continue the Lincoln Schools that had recently been established in black churches. / The AMA's educational program at Macon emphasized "religion, patriotism, morality, and an industrious black citizenry." To increase the number of black teachers, in 1868 the AMA instituted a normal curriculum at its newly opened Lewis High, which soon became a model teacher training school. / The Macon School Board designated Lewis High a public school for blacks in 1872, but in 1875 the AMA resumed control. In 1888 the AMA built a new, larger facility, renamed Ballard Normal School. The purpose of this dissertation is to trace the history of Ballard until 1949 and to determine its effectiveness in educating African Americans in Central Georgia. / Until the 1940s Ballard was one of few secondary schools for blacks in Georgia. Led by principals such as George Burrage and Raymond von Tobel, students thrived and the school not only survived but excelled. Public schools for black students in Bibb County ended at grade six, and fully-accredited Ballard offered the only opportunity for a high school education. After completing Ballard's four-year college-preparatory course, many students pursued higher education. Those completing the normal program became teachers. Ballard graduates went on to make significant contributions to their professions, their communities, and society at large. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 57-01, Section: A, page: 0402. / Major Professor: Joe Richardson. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1995.

From 1941 to 1943, and again from 1947 to 1972, Congressman Hale Boggs represented Louisiana's Second Congressional District. While most southern political leaders led the 'massive resistance' to the civil rights movement, Boggs traveled throughout the South urging whites and blacks to work together peaceably toward abolishing racial segregation and prejudices. He used his position as majority whip and later as majority leader of the U.S. House of Representatives to implement federal programs to achieve economic, political, and social equality in America. Unlike most southern white politicians, he cultivated an official political relationship with blacks, advocated advancements and improvements for all Americans, particularly blacks, and avoided race-baiting. As his career developed, he increasingly sided with the national Democratic party rather than the southern delegation; even, on a couple of occasions, supporting civil rights legislation This study utilizes Congressman Boggs' personal and congressional papers housed at Tulane University, newspapers, secondary works, and oral histories to detail Boggs' relationship with blacks and whites in his district, state, the Deep South, and the nation / acase@tulane.edu