ABSTRACT The purpose of this thesis is to examine the Sit-in movement in Chattanooga, Tennessee during the early 1960s in the context of a perpetuating tradition of protest in the African American community spanning more than a century. The study will also illustrate how it was a unique episode in the annals of the Civil Rights Movement in that it was strictly orchestrated by high school students without the input or support of adults, yet it has largely been neglected by historians. The research conducted includes oral histories, newspaper clippings, private manuscript collections, books, videos, and periodicals which provide great insight into the minds, motives, and methods of those involved. The study also depicts the galvanizing spirit, ignited by the students, which compelled the community to act and resulted in monumental social changes.

Socialite Laura Penrose and a group of wealthy businessmen founded the New Orleans Chapter of the American Red Cross in 1916. The Chapter expanded in 1917 with the addition of two black Auxiliary Branches chartered by nurses Louise Ross and Sarah Brown. Although Jim Crow dictated the division between the Chapter and its Branches within the mostly female organization, racial barriers did not prohibit them from uniting for the cause of national relief. The American Red Cross differed from other forms of biracial Progressivism by the very nature of public relief work for a national charity. American Red Cross relief work brought women into public spaces for the war effort and pushed biracial cooperation between women in the Jim Crow South in a more public and patriotic direction than earlier efforts at social reform. Black women, in particular, used the benefit of relief work to promote racial uplift and stake a claim on American citizenship despite the disenfranchisement of their men.

Though many scholars have explored the memory of slavery in Southern literature, my project expands these readings through a hybrid critical methodology from the fields of trauma studies, African American studies, historiography, and psychoanalysis to articulate how texts about the antebellum past enable later Southern authors to imagine present and future race relations in the South. I analyze how the particularities of the myriad afterlives of slavery – particularly in the economic, social, and political subjugation and terrorization of African Americans – are expressed or repressed in literature about the antebellum past, and argue that these texts demonstrate the varying processes by which white supremacy is enacted in the Jim Crow era. I argue in my first chapter that the plantation fictions of Thomas Nelson Page and Joel Chandler Harris commingle ideologies of antebellum paternalism and contemporary white supremacy to cast the future South as one founded on the reimagining of black subservience. My second chapter examines how black authors Paul Laurence Dunbar and Charles Chesnutt revise plantation romance, their techniques of masking and doubling enabling them to create an alternative collective memory that exposes the trauma of slavery and the fictive constructs of paternalism. Nonetheless, their lack of success outside this accommodationist genre exposes the limitations of black voice. My third chapter considers the portrayal of race and racism in white Southern women’s writings about the Civil War; Margaret Mitchell and Caroline Gordon explore the idea of modern white female freedom as contingent upon the continued subjugation of African Americans. I argue that Mitchell’s and Gordon’s novels displace the history of slavery –in fact, erase its very presence –as a kind of fantasy of white supremacy in the 1930s. In my fourth chapter, I analyze how William Faulkner’s The Unvanquished fluctuates between anxiety about and aggrandizement of the antebellum past, thereby demonstrating the difficulties of modifying white Southern collective memory. The conclusion reads Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God through her protagonist’s constitution of a storied self, one which enables her to recuperate the traumatic past of slavery.

ABSTRACT Joseph Echols Lowery, a key founding member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957, led the organization for twenty years. This study explores how Lowery, who took over during an era when many considered the civil rights movement dead, reenergized the SCLC, became a leading black spokesman who challenged Congress, presidents and the Justice Department around issues of voting rights and social justice, while consistently questioning U.S. hegemonic international and domestic policies around jobs and poverty. This research further investigates how Lowery fought for the continuation of affirmative action in the midst of an oftentimes hostile environment and waged campaigns against multi-national companies that discriminated against blacks and minorities. This qualitative empowerment study examines how and why Lowery and the SCLC became the leading non-Muslim influence on the 1995 Million Man March and his role in affirming women leaders and their initiatives.

An unnoticed shift is underway in the revanchist model of accumulation by dispossession (Harvey, 2005) that is rebranding the neoliberal reorganization of space and economic growth. I call this shift “Urban Revanchism as Sustainability,” following Mike Davis and Daniel Monk (2007). In this study, I describe how Tampa elites, led by Democratic Mayor Bob Buckhorn, use politically popular discourses of ‘sustainability’, ‘walkability’, ‘bike-ability’, among others, to coopt the rhetoric and symbols of social and environmental justice as cover for urban capital accumulation. I describe how in the wake of 2008 which devastated Tampa, and in the context of the subsequent gentrification of downtown Tampa, this sustainable urban revitalization strategy is being used to legitimize accumulation by dispossession of the most sought-after land on the downtown waterfront. This ‘green’ mode of enforcing urban revanchism is a politically charged, class-based process that is based on the prior militarization of the city police and securitization of urban space, contradicting the principles of social and environmental sustainability (Agyeman, 2003). Based on ethnographic observations, interviews, newspaper reviews, and document analysis, I show how an environmental facade is being layered over exclusionary forms of racial displacement and class exploitation. As such, the rebranding of a system of militarized exclusion and displacement which amounts to a selective neo-liberal “right to the city” is being normalized across the downtown riverfront. The resulting new waterfront city valorizes individualized entertainment and consumption for elites and privileged business professionals, at the same that it discourages collective solidarity and care among the dwindling middle- and working classes, and enforces private competition among the poor and unemployed.

This thesis explores how African American children in the North learned race and racial identity during the Jim Crow era. Influences such as literature, media, parental instruction, interactions with others, and observations are examined.

In 1945, Black leaders gained political and financial support from the governments of Virginia and the United States to establish the Booker T. Washington Birthplace Memorial at the site of Washington’s birth in Franklin County, Virginia. The Memorial organization undertook public history work that emphasized Washington as a significant figure in United States history and provided needed education services to Black Southerners. In pursuit of their goals staff, of the Memorial navigated the political and social context of Jim Crow Virginia; this thesis discusses how the history of Booker T. Washington was represented during the founding and operation of the Birthplace Memorial (1945-1956), a time of upheaval in Virginian race relations. / M.A. / Memorials are spaces of remembrance which signify the values of the society in which they are constructed. In 1945, a group of Black leaders established a memorial to Booker T. Washington at the site of his birth in Hardy, Virginia. The establishment of this memorial was a remarkable feat in the historical context of its creation. Memorial founders gained support from white elites in the Virginia and federal governments during the Jim Crow Era, a time of legal and social discrimination against African Americans. This thesis explores the work of the public historians at The Booker T. Washington Birthplace Memorial as they gained support for its establishment, developed programming to meet the needs of the local African American community, and represented the history of Booker T. Washington.

In 1917, Henry Billiot sued the Terrebonne Parish School Board because his children, who identified as Houma Indian, were denied access to a local white school. The resulting case, Henry Billiot v. Terrebonne Parish School Board, shaped the way in which the community of Terrebonne Parish categorized the race of not only the Billiot family but also the Houma tribe over the course of fifty years. Through the use of Jim Crow legislation, the white community legally refused to consider the Houma tribe as American Indian, and instead chose the derogatory term Sabine as the racial classification of this indigenous group, which detrimentally impacted the United Houma Nation’s fight for federal recognition as an American Indian tribe.

ABSTRACT Charles W. Chesnutt captures the essence of the Post Civil War period and gives examples of the assimilation process for African Americans into dominant white culture. In doing so, he shows the resistance of the dominant culture as well as the resilience of the African American culture. It is his belief that through literature he could encourage moral reform and eliminate racial discrimination. As an African American author who could pass for white, he is able to share his own experiences and to develop black characters who are ambitious and intelligent. As a result, he leaves behind a legacy of great works that are both informative and entertaining.

Thesis advisor: James O'Toole / This thesis examines the extent of Jim Crow segregation in college football in the era immediately preceding World War II by focusing on three black stars: Wilmeth Sidat-Singh of Syracuse, Lou Montgomery of Boston College, and Leonard Bates of New York University. Sidat-Singh was passed off by Syracuse as a Hindu before his real ethnicity was revealed. Montgomery was benched by his Catholic university on six separate occasions, including two bowl games. Bates was the beneficiary of a massive student protest for his inclusion, but ultimately was benched by the supposedly liberal NYU. These benchings of northern players against southern teams shows the degrees the south went to in order to impose segregation on every level of society. Perhaps more importantly it shows how willing northern schools were to acquiesce to these southern demands in favor of expediency. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2005. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History. / Discipline: College Honors Program.