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This dissertation is an institutional history of the Mississippi State Hospital. Specifically, it is a study of the use of the hospital as an institutional instrument to establish, maintain, reinforce state-sponsored racial segregation and white supremacy during the period of Jim Crow in Mississippi. Mississippi's institution for its mentally ill residents became an instrument to reinforce the state's racially, socially, and economically rigid society.

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The dissertation examines African American Freemasons throughout the South during the Jim Crow era. The secret nature of Prince Hall Affiliated Freemasonry (PHA) has hidden the contribution and activism of the organization and its members. I argue the organization is part of a web of networks that fought for civil and human rights for African Americans. Through PHA, members are cultivated into leaders, activists, businessmen; over the years, the members have created an initiatic identity that connected them to the African American community and humanity. The significance of my study is that I analyze PHA through a womanist lens and argue the organization has a diarchal gender relationship that allows women and men to take on leadership and activist roles that differed from the normative gender relationship of their time.

"This thesis proposes to investigate the theory posed by Comer Vann Howard in 'The Strange Career of Jim Crow.' Woodward claims that complete physical segregation of Negroes was not legally established in the Southern states until the turn of the century. He further contends the period from Reconstruction until the 1890s was an era when Negroes participated in many activities with whites. This work investigates Woodward's theory in its applicability to Texas between 1874 and 1898. The study begins with redemption, which came to Texas in 1874 with the election of the first Democratic governor since the Civil War. The concluding year of 1896 was chosen because the last Negro to serve in the Texas Legislature ended his term that year."-- leaf [i].

This thesis works to establish a literary theory and cultural studies as a theoretical lens with which we can view harmful emerging pop culture phenomena like the so-called alt right. The premise is supposed in three parts, with the first being a simple introduction to the Pepe character and how he is grounded in literary studies through a comparison of Sherlock Holmes and his early fandom. The second part is a survey of the legacy of Jim Crow and I present the evidence that Pepe is very much Crow’s spiritual successor in their shared preoccupation with white anxiety. The third is a discussion of language in which I bridge the use of memes as language with how that language effectively communicates. Ultimately, Pepe the Frog is able to tap into the pop culture collective through a democratizing of language facilitated by digital spaces on the internet, and his proliferation is made readily viral by the racist language he speaks through ala Jim Crow era anxieties.

The ways in which white Americans understand the racial landscape and their own racial identities are not well understood. Through the lens of the racial past, in this study I investigate how memory operates within the white racial frame, the dominant white-centric worldview, to uphold systemic racism and to maintain whites’ collective and individual identities. Through a narrative analysis of original in-depth interviews conducted with 44 ordinary white southerners – lifetime residents of Greensboro, North Carolina – who lived through the legal segregation and civil rights eras, this research demonstrates the interviewees’ contemporary investment in positive notions of the white self and white society. The respondents' autobiographical narratives of life during legal segregation, a time of overt white supremacy, are typified by nostalgia for a childhood era of safety, security, and "good" race relations. Interviewees' narratives of the civil rights era, including nonviolent student sit-in protests for which Greensboro is known and school desegregation, have themes of disruption, danger, and white victimization. Overall, respondents portray Jim Crow segregation as a calm and peaceful time and the civil rights era as chaotic and harmful to whites, at the same time as they acknowledge, to a limited extent, the unfairness of Jim Crow's blatant racial inequalities. In this work I propose the concepts white victimology, white protectionism, and white moral identity. I argue that white victimology – whites' perception, largely imagined, of their own racial victimization – is a major ideological and emotional facet of the white racial frame, whereby whites dismiss the historical and contemporary reality of white racism. My analysis demonstrates that white victimology is a primary way in which whites assert themselves, individually and collectively, as racial innocents and "good" people. In this work I also conceptualize the dynamic of white protectionism, explanatory and rhetorical ways in which whites "rescue" white acquaintances and family members from potential accusations of racism. Ultimately, I argue that whites' investment in perpetuating white dominance and upholding the white racial frame occurs through white moral identity-making, myriad active and subtle ways that whites continue to construct themselves positively and construct people of color, especially black Americans, negatively.

Title from PDF of title page. / Document formatted into pages; contains 147 pages. / Thesis (M.A.)--University of South Florida, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references. / Text (Electronic thesis) in PDF format. / ABSTRACT: Blanche Armwood was a remarkable black woman activist, from Tampa, Florida, who devoted her life to improving the political, social, and economic status of blacks in the Jim Crow South. Local historians have kept Armwood's legacy alive by describing her achievements and by emphasizing her dedication to the African-American population during one of the most racist periods in American history. In their efforts to understand Armwood's career, scholars depend upon race as the primary category of analysis and focus mainly on the external forces that defined Armwood's world. They argue that she became resigned to her lot in life as a black woman, and consequently chose to accommodate rather than challenge the Southern racial system. This thesis offers an alternative interpretation of Armwood's activism. / ABSTRACT: It argues that Blanche Armwood rejected the white supremacist ideology of the Jim Crow South and insisted on equal opportunity and political equality for all African-Americans. This study examines how social variables such as race, gender, and class intersected in her life, shaping her world view and leadership style. It explores how Armwood's experiences as a southern, middle-class, black woman affected her racial ideology. Armwood left behind a powerful legacy of resistance against the second-class status that white America imposed on blacks during the nadir in African-American history. She contested the white South's perception of African-American women. In a world that associated them with Mammy and Jezebel stereotypes, Armwood insisted that African-American women deserved the same respect that society accorded white women. / ABSTRACT: Armwood fought for political equality, demanding that black women should have the right to vote and participate in the civic process as women and as African-Americans. In addition, she believed that the federal government had a responsibility to protect all its citizens and that every American was entitled to equal treatment before the law. Finally, Armwood&softsign;s racial uplift work revealed her faith in the cornerstone of the American creed, its promise of equal opportunity. She provided some blacks with the chance to move away from poverty and illiteracy to become respectable middle-class Americans. / System requirements: World Wide Web browser and PDF reader. / Mode of access: World Wide Web.

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The purpose of this project is to ascertain the ways in which Orange is the New Black uses its platform to either complicate or reify narratives about the prison system, prisoners and their relationship to the state. This research uses the works of Giorgio Agamben, Colin Dayan, Michelle Alexander and Lisa Guenther to situate the ways the state uses the prison and social narratives about the prison to extend its control on certain populations beyond prison walls through police presence, parole, the war on drugs and prison fees. From that basis, this work argues that while Orange does challenge some narratives about race and sexuality, because of its reliance on “bad choices” as a humanizing trope and its reliance on certain racialized stereotypes for entertainment, the show ultimately does more to reify existing narratives that support state interests.