Virtually all commentators on the work of Vachel Lindsay have seen his poetry and prose as primarily artistic and for the most part indecipherable. I have tried to show that Lindsay intended to address social construction in America. He tried to use his art to change America, first and foremost, but also the world. And the changes he wanted to enact revolved around the issues of race, religion, feminism, and temperance. Lindsay wanted to alter the racial hierarchy in America to promote a more inclusive perspective. But not to make it all inclusive. And one of the prime motivations for Lindsay's interest in race was to change his own status within the hierarchy. There was an American Indian branch to his family tree. Consequently Indians became prime candidates for social inclusion in his poetry and prose. The Springfield race riots of 1908 represented a formative experience for Lindsay and helped propel him to a discussion of race. Lindsay claimed Springfield, Illinois as home, and the injustice and brutality of the riots shamed him and clashed with his perspective of civilized and religious advancement. In writing "The Congo," The Art of the Moving Picture, and The Golden Book of Springfield, Lindsay saw himself as promoting racial harmony and equality. However, he intentionally promoted harmony and order at the expense of equality. I conclude my dissertation with an obseration from the sociologist Herbert Marcuse to the effect that saving oneself at the expense of others is hardly a heoic act. / text

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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Ohio University, June, 2008. / Title from PDF t.p. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2008. / Title from first page of PDF file (viewed September 23, 2008). Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 274-284).

This thesis examines how local leaders in Detroit, Michigan attempted to use the Detroit Tigers' World Series victory in 1968 to repair the city's image following the 1967 riot. First, this study looks at the history of race relations in Detroit, beginning with the founding of the city in 1701. Second, it analyzes the 1967 riot, which, up to that point, was the most destructive urban riot in American history. Finally, this thesis examines the public relations campaign of local leaders in 1968. They tried, unsuccessfully, to convince the public that Detroit's race relations could be healed through a sense of unity that the Tigers' success brought about. This study argues that Detroit's racial problems ran too deep and lasted for too long for a single, transient sporting event to have any sort of permanent effect. / Department of History

This project is an historical ethnography and a cultural history of the anti-black race riots and anti-abolition riots in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1829, 1836, and 1841. It is also a case history in an urban and commercial/early industrial context of the idea that violent social practices such as riots, as well as law and the customary practices of everyday living, are deployed as race making technologies, actually constructing racial categories. By extending this constructivist concept to the conversion of space to place through the human ascription of meaning, this study also examines racial violence as a strategy for place making - for establishing and maintaining Cincinnati as a white city, one in which the social practices of its white residents, including those of community development, consistently define and preserve the privileges of being white. Many sectors of the white-identified population performed this co-construction of race and place. Using a multi-disciplinary approach to method and theory, the discourses and practices of improvement - the community development of the period - and of race making in antebellum Cincinnati were analyzed using local newspapers and a variety of other published and unpublished sources from the period. Analysis of the overlapping discourses and practices of race making and the "Negro problem" and of improvement indicated that white Cincinnatians of all classes, men and women, participated in creating a local racialized culture of community development. This was a prevailing set of values and practices in the city based on assumptions about who could be improved, who could improve the city, and who should benefit from the city's improvements. The language of local improvement boosters was particularly powerful in synthesizing images of nation, region, and community in which a harmonious fit between the land, the virtuous population who comes to develop it, and the free and republican institutions they put on the land had no room for Negroes and mulattoes in the picture. White rioters, and those elites and city officials who enabled them to act, acted with them, or didn't stop them from assaulting Negroes, mulattoes, or the abolitionists who were their allies, and burning and looting their property, acted within a socio-cultural context of widespread local economic and social boosterism and improvementism. Using their local common sense about race relations, as well as about improving the community, the white residents of Cincinnati enacted a public strategy of community development to attempt to achieve a city with few Negroes. Racialized community development, instrumentalized though the collective violence of race riots and ant-abolition riots, made Cincinnati a whiter city.

Tulsa, Oklahoma's historically African American neighborhood of Greenwood in North Tulsa has long been contested terrain. Built by black settlers beginning in the late nineteenth-century, the neighborhood evolved into a vibrant community challenged by waves of violence--segregation at statehood in 1907, the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, ongoing disinvestment, and processes of urban renewal beginning in the late 1950s--that contributed to the erosion of the neighborhood and the eventual displacement of many area residents into remote housing projects further into North Tulsa. These waves of violence were propelled by Oklahoma lawmakers, local Tulsa government officials, members of the Ku Klux Klan, and private white citizens who worked to expand the city's color line by controlling the placement and visibility of black people in Tulsa and gain ownership of Greenwood--as the neighborhood was, and is, located on desirable land. The people of Greenwood met these waves of violence with acts of resistance. They organized and lobbied against segregation at statehood, fought to save their community during the Tulsa Race Riot, and galvanized to rebuild almost immediately after. They maintained a culture of interdependence that contributed to strength in community and economy. Beginning in the late 1950s, they protested their displacement. However, by the late 1980s, the ravages of slum clearance and expressway building had rendered much of Greenwood unlivable and many residents had no choice but to relocate. The loss of historic place and increased distance between community members made it difficult to maintain their shared identity and culture of interdependence. Taken altogether, these four waves of violence functioned as tools to carry out the city of Tulsa's longstanding agenda of reclaiming the prime urban real estate of Greenwood while broadening the area of land that segregated black & white Tulsa. At the root existed white supremacy: the belief in the inherent superiority of the white race and its fundamental right to dominate society.

This study deploys the decolonial epistemic perspective in an attempt to unmask the spectre of xenophobia. The decolonial epistemic thinking is in turn predicated on three important concepts, namely coloniality of power, coloniality of being and coloniality of knowledge. The study is focused on understanding the dynamics of the violent May 2008 attacks that took place in Alexandra and Yeoville. It problematised the use of the term xenophobia. The term occludes rather than enlightening the complex phenomenon of violence. Such violence has consistently and systematically engulfed people living in poor predominantly black areas of residence such as Yeoville and Alexandra. The study also used empirical evidence collected from the field to support its central arguments. What has been understood as xenophobia is in actual fact, part of the manifestation and outcome of abject living conditions of the poor. This study argues that what manifests itself as xenophobia is an additional element to various forms of violence taking place in locales such as Alexandra and Yeoville, places that decolonial theorists term ‘zones of non-being,’ where violent death is a constitutive part of human existence. / Development Studies / M.A. (Development Studies)

This study deploys the decolonial epistemic perspective in an attempt to unmask the spectre of xenophobia. The decolonial epistemic thinking is in turn predicated on three important concepts, namely coloniality of power, coloniality of being and coloniality of knowledge. The study is focused on understanding the dynamics of the violent May 2008 attacks that took place in Alexandra and Yeoville. It problematised the use of the term xenophobia. The term occludes rather than enlightening the complex phenomenon of violence. Such violence has consistently and systematically engulfed people living in poor predominantly black areas of residence such as Yeoville and Alexandra. The study also used empirical evidence collected from the field to support its central arguments. What has been understood as xenophobia is in actual fact, part of the manifestation and outcome of abject living conditions of the poor. This study argues that what manifests itself as xenophobia is an additional element to various forms of violence taking place in locales such as Alexandra and Yeoville, places that decolonial theorists term ‘zones of non-being,’ where violent death is a constitutive part of human existence. / Development Studies / M. A. (Development Studies)