Institutionalized racial segregation in the United States has had a significant impact on many aspects of American culture. Segregation was practiced in every aspect of public life, even in areas of recreation. For those labeled as "nonwhite," even going to the beach was legally restricted. The events between the 1950s and 1960s at Homestead Bayfront Beach in Homestead, Florida are evidence that social stratification based on the social categorization of race has a significant effect even today. This research examines how legalized segregation in the past impacted society and contributed to the development of a place and identity at Homestead Bayfront Beach. This analysis not only fills a gap in the historical record on segregation and recreation in the United States, but also contributes to research on place and place making and the formation of memory and identity.

This dissertation is based on a qualitative research project that documents the experiences of nearly 100 elderly African Americans who lived in the total institution of Jim Crow. The collective long lasting psychological effects connected with the racial violence that occurred in the total institution are a critical aspect. In the interviews African Americans shared how on a daily basis they found themselves dealing with anxiety, fear, humiliation, shame, and stress. The narratives were analyzed utilizing the extended case method. The dissertation documents and explores symptoms of a "segregation stress syndrome" for the chronic, enduring, extremely painful experiences and responses to the total institution of Jim Crow that are indicated by numerous respondents in this research project. Preliminary findings indicate that the symptoms of "segregation stress syndrome" are similar to PTSD symptoms documented in psychiatric literature. However, "segregation stress syndrome" differs from PTSD because the traumatic experience was not a one-time occurrence; it was sustained, over time, in African American communities. In addition, the racial violence that occurred was a form of systematic chronic stress, the type that has been shown to have a detrimental impact on a person's psychological well-being. Lastly, the historical and collective trauma that ensued has contributed to an intergenerational aspect of "segregation stress syndrome." The intergenerational aspect predisposes some younger African Americans to psychological damage, stress, and trauma even though contemporary forms of racial violence are seemingly less damaging.

<p>Debate about the development of African American English (AAE) dominated sociolinguistic inquiry for the second half of the 20th century and continues to be a subject of investigation. All hypotheses about the development of AAE integrate ideas of shared linguistic features coupled with strong regional influences or founding effects. Most Southern evidence used in the development of these hypotheses, however, is from rural communities or somehow unique enclave communities. The early urban centers of African American life in the South that followed the abolition of slavery and disintegration of plantation life have seldom been investigated with respect to the development of AAE. This study examines precisely those sites looking at AAE in three Southern urban centers during the time of Jim Crow or institutionalized segregation: Birmingham, Memphis, and New Orleans.</p><p>This analysis is based on a series of tape-recorded oral history interviews that were conducted as part of the Behind the Veil project at Duke University. The Behind the Veil project was launched in 1990 at Duke and the majority of the interviews were conducted between 1994 and 1997. Each speaker completed a survey regarding her/his life history, education, professional history, and family background. The speakers used for this study were chosen based on age (all born before 1942) and residency status in their respective communities - all speakers are lifelong residents of Birmingham, Memphis, or New Orleans. These criteria and others shape an inclusive corpus of 100 total tape-recorded interviews with 33 from Birmingham, 35 from Memphis, and 32 from New Orleans. </p><p>Quantitative analysis of five core diagnostic structures of AAE (i.e. copula absence, plural -s, pre-vocalic consonant cluster reduction, rhoticity, and 3rd person singular verbal -s) was performed to provide a window for determining the shared and distinct patterns of early, urban AAE development. These data are used for inter-generational analyses, cross-gender analyses, analyses of socioeconomic factors and overall interpretation for each individual site and between different sites. </p><p>These data contribute to the continuing study and scholarship on the historical development of African American English, providing the first multi-community overview of core African American English linguistic variables from the early urban South. The trans-regional similarities of linguistic variables in AAE speakers are often attributed to the influence of early Southern English varieties. These data confirm the early presence of these variables in African American urban centers in the South, but also suggest how language ideologies relate to dialect development.</p> / Dissertation

The Marines of Montford Point are largely absent from the World War II narrative, and relatively unknown to individuals in the military services and to the public at large. After 144 years of official policy against allowing blacks to serve their country as U.S. Marines, on June 1, 1942, the nation's first black Marines broke the color barrier, gaining entry into a military organization that today carries with it tremendous symbolic and mythic significance in America. Moreover, serving in harm's way to defend a prejudiced nation, black Marines demonstrated bravery and endurance in the face of institutionalized racism. This thesis examines the southern Jim Crow experiences of selected northern African American Marines, focusing on the ways in which these men responded to the discrimination they encountered in the South. It also explores the reasons why these men joined the most racist branch of the military and what knowledge they had of Executive Order 8802 and the Navy Department's May 20, 1942, press release, announcing the Marine Corps's plans for recruiting blacks. Furthermore, it examines the various ways in which all African American Marines coped with Jim Crow laws, and explores the realities that black and white American society created about black Marines and their wartime service. It also discusses how northern and southern black Marines engaged and interacted within a strict segregationist military organization, particularly in how the Marine Corps manipulated the Selective Service in order to protect what senior officers considered to be its elitist image. The comparison to the U.S. Army's framework of task organization and combat employment of black soldiers reveals that the Army made greater strides toward racial justice and equality by allowing blacks to serve as commissioned officers, albeit in segregated units; whereas the Marine Corps instituted no comparable reform. After the war began, the Marines could have commissioned African Americans by following the models of all-black units such as the 93rd Infantry Division and the Tuskegee Airmen. In sum, initial racial opinions shifted differently in each military service during the war; and for black Marines, it officially marked a new tradition of military service.

This study examines the ways in which a formerly incarcerated U.S. born Africana man age 47 perceives, interprets, and copes with being criminalized and disenfranchised by interacting institutions which support white domination and black subordination. The focal point of inquiry is an analysis of the reverberating mental health impacts of structural racism via the criminal justice system. Utilizing portraiture and person-environment fit theory, this study presents a multivocal portrait of a man, his life, his family, and his community impacted by the stress/strain of navigating environments characterized by structural racism and inequality. The study seeks to add to the relevant bodies of knowledge a more nuanced and contextual examination of the negative mental health impacts of structural racism via the criminal justice system, which will inform policy and advocacy issues, as well as future interventions designed to empower historically marginalized populations in the U.S.

No description available.

"The Negro's Place" examines the relationship between public education and urban development in twentieth-century New Orleans, arguing that the expansion of segregated public schooling eroded two centuries of residential integration and contributed to the disparate development of white and black neighborhoods. The study challenges the popular concept of "white flight" as an explanation for metropolitan change by demonstrating that school segregation, as well as reaction to desegregation, divided urban and suburban space along racial lines. It also inverts prevailing scholarly interpretations of this transformation, which emphasize that public and private manipulation of the housing market created the racially distinct communities that promoted and sustained segregated schools. Additionally, the dissertation's examination of schools, race, and space underscores the extent to which Jim Crow continued to evolve through a dynamic, oftentimes improvisational process during the twentieth century. Finally, it demonstrates that, even as public schools became the sites of courtroom and neighborhood battles over desegregation, they continued to tighten racial inequality in ways that contemporary activists and observers did not always recognize. Most significantly, in the decades before and after World War II, segregated schools created structural inequalities in housing that impeded desegregation's capacity to promote racial justice. / acase@tulane.edu

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / The systemic racism imposed on the lives and education aspiration of six of my elders who stayed in the racist South during the ferociously deleterious era of Jim Crow is the focus of this phenomenological critical race study. These stories centered the voices of my elders as powerful weapons to expose white supremacy and the psychophysiological trauma imposed upon my elders. These stories were about the lives, lived experiences, and educational trials and triumphs of six of my Brown and Black hue American elders whose ancestry was born out of slavery and delivered into the vicious Jim Crow era. My work was grounded in Phenomenological Critical Race Theory. Critical Race Theory validates my elders’ narratives and their narratives fortify the tenets of CRT. For you see, racism was an everyday phenomenon my elders experienced as residents of rural Southern America. My elders came to understand “what” they were, Black, by understanding “who” they were not, White. Furthermore, this qualitative phenomenological critical race study was guided by three inquiries, what experiences have you had with Jim Crow; how or in what ways did your experiences with Jim Crow affect your education; and how or in what ways did your experience with Jim Crow affect your life? These inquiries produced four intersecting themes, 1) the survival of racism as part of everyday life, 2) economic exploitation of Black labor, 3) denial of equitable education, and 4) the sociopolitical construction of racial identity, and three significant findings, racist place, sociopolitical oppression, and inequitable education.

From the end of Reconstruction to the beginning of World War II, no other ecological change affected as great a part of the southern landscape as the loss of the longleaf pine from the southeastern coastal plain. This dissertation examines the causes and consequences of the species’ disappearance. In the span of just decades, lumber operations and naval stores producers descended upon longleaf pine woodlands with a voracious appetite that greatly contributed to the demise of the pine. However, as this dissertation argues, exploitation by the hands of the timber and turpentine industries was not the only agent that transformed the ecoregion. The development of American conservation and forestry, ironically, played a significant role in this process and contributed to the rise of a new southern forest, now stocked with another pine – the loblolly. By looking at the biologists, chemists, and foresters who studied the longleaf for the United States Department of Agriculture and various state agencies from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, this dissertation traces how forest sciences in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era shaped the modern ecology of the South. These sciences, too, were entangled in the social and political realities of Jim Crow. Researchers had to ensure that their measures conformed to a segregated society if conservation was to take root in southern woodlands. The conservation practices that federal and state agents put into place as forestry developed into an important and profitable science had profound impacts on not only the land but also those at the bottom of a racial caste system.

No description available.