This thesis explores the research questions: How did African Americans cope with the oppressive system of legal segregation? How did they survive and raise their families? What were African Americans’ everyday interactions with whites like during legal segregation? What coping and resistance strategies did they utilize to survive? Using case studies from nearly 100 in-depth interviews with elderly African Americans between the ages of 50-90 in the Southeast and Southwest, I use qualitative methods to detail and analyze the experiences of elderly African Americans. This thesis explores how the exploitation and oppression of African Americans during legal segregation were enshrined by means of racial violence and discrimination in every aspect of American society. Much of the racial violence was legitimized and essential to the routine operation of legal segregation in the United States. Building on the work of Jackman(2002), Blee(2005), and Feagin (2006) for this thesis, I conceptualize racial violence as physical violence, written violence, and/or spoken violence, including being called “nigger,” “boy,” and “uncle.” The racial violence can be individual or collective which, intentionally or unintentionally, inflicts or threatens to inflict physical, psychological, social, or material injury on African Americans who often resist. In addition, the racial violence can occur in any public or private geographical location including, the street, workplace, and home. Lastly, an individual does not have to witness or personally experience the racial violence to be psychologically injured or affected by it. During legal segregation the respondents faced actual everyday racial violence or the threat of racial violence in the form of lynchings, sexual abuse, house burnings, imprisonment, rape, and being incessantly called “nigger.” I argue that the psychological traumatic experiences of fear, anxiety, stress, anguish, humiliation, stigmatization and shame can affect a person’s life for a very long time. Every one of these injuries is apparent in the interviews with elderly African Americans who survived legal segregation. Thus, I suggest the important idea of a “segregation stress syndrome,” for the chronic, enduring, extremely painful responses to official segregation that are indicated by the respondents.

Transforming Trauma: Memory and Slavery in Black Atlantic Literature since 1830 examines the interplay between remembering and forgetting in literary and cultural engagements with the trauma of transatlantic slavery. The dissertation considers how intergenerational, trans-temporal trauma becomes re-narrativized and re-envisioned over time in four symbolic sites of slavery (five countries)—Africa (Ghana and Mozambique), the Caribbean (Cuba), Brazil, and the United States—with the goal of exposing differences and emphasizing ruptures. Each chapter functions like a slave schooner arriving at an outpost of the African Diaspora, touring an eclectic transatlantic archive of slavery including art, public space, newspaper clippings, telenovelas, monuments (both imagined and built), song, and advertising copy, then dropping an anchor to explore a more traditional cross section of literature from each national context, juxtaposing canonical and non-canonical works. Taken together, the chapters probe the ways nineteenth and twentieth century Inter-American and African “texts,” broadly defined, register the trauma of slavery in the Black Atlantic. Chapter 1 discusses Brazilian author Bernardo Guimarães’ short novel, A Escrava Isaura (1875) and its wildly popular telenovela adaption in 1976 as an example of one of slavery’s twentieth century kitsch manifestations. The theme of Exodus in African American literature is considered in chapter 2 with a reading of Frances E.W. Harper’s 1869 poem, “Moses,” followed by an extended exploration of the early twentieth century Mammy cult including the 1922 statue proposal. Chapter 3 explores scenes of racial violence and offers a reading of the horrific American ritual of lynching in Jean Toomer’s “Kabnis” and “Portrait in Georgia” in Cane (1923) followed by textual analysis of Robert Hayden’s “Middle Passage” (1962, 1966). Chapter 4 focuses on the Brazilian collective memory of the old historic district of Pelourinho in Salvador, Bahia as the former site of punishment at the pillory (whipping post) for enslaved Africans. Close readings in this chapter include Castro Alves’s classic epic poem, “O navio negreiro” from Os Escravos (1883) and Carolina Maria de Jesus’s diary of favela life, O Quarto de Despejo (1960) in addition to shorter readings of the poetry of Alzira Rufino, Esmeralda Ribeiro, Francisco Alvim, and a short novel by Dudda Seixas. Chapter 5 engages with the charged metaphor of sugar and compares the only extant nineteenth century Cuban slave narrative, Juan Francisco Manzano’s Autobiografía de un esclavo (1839) with a twentieth century account of maroon Esteban Montejo’s slave narrative as related to anthropologist/writer Miguel Barnet in Cimarrón: Historia de un esclavo (1966). The final chapter addresses the so-called literary African amnesia around slavery and examines vestiges of the memory of slavery in three African texts: Noémia de Sousa’s “Negra” (1949), Ama Ata Aidoo’s The Dilemma of a Ghost (1965), and Ayi Kwei Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons (1973).

This thesis investigates the continued hostilities and increasing backlash against the American Muslim community in the United States from a critical perspective that centralizes the racialization of Muslims and Muslim looking-people. The increasing anti-Muslim backlash against American Muslims warrants the need for a critical examination and analysis of the roots of this backlash and why, almost 11 years after September 11th, 2001, conditions for Muslims and Muslim looking-people are worsening. The term Islamophobia has been conceptualized and defined differently by various scholars, contributing to an analytical dilemma of how Muslims rationalize and resist anti-Muslim backlash. Therefore, the concept of racialization provides a fuller perspective and understanding as to why Muslim and non-Muslim Arabs, South Asians, and African Americans have been subjected to rising suspicion, surveillance, imprisonment, and violence in a post 9/11/2001 era. This thesis posits the notion of the white Christian Normative, an inherent Christian bias embedded deep within the racialized social system of the United States. This Christian Normative has its roots in the colonial confrontation between European colonizers and Indigenous populations in what is now considered the United States and has maintained its significance in impacting the life chances of non-white non-Christian minorities ever since. This thesis argues that it is the Christian normative that drives and sustains the anti-Muslim backlash in the United States. The anti-Muslim backlash that is growing stronger in the United States is also theoretically conceptualized within this thesis. This thesis utilizes qualitative data collected from 23 in-depth interviews with Arab and South Asian American Muslim college students between the ages of 18 to 35 years from the Midwest as its empirical basis.

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Utilizing qualitative methodology, this study examines how, from their perspective, a sample of lower-class black men ages 20-35 justify their participation in violent confrontations and define the concept of disrespect. The purpose of this study is to glean whether or not a relationship exists between the rationales offered for participating in violent confrontations and being "dissed." This study also seeks to examine the interpersonal dynamics that compose a violent confrontation, shifting the level of analysis from macro-level arguments of the past. The research demonstrates that the rationales for interpersonal violence surround four themes: (1) Self-defense; (2) trespassing on territory; (3) acting in the defense of third parties; and (4) threatening behavior. It was declared by the respondents that the following actions were found to be disrespectful: (1) verbal insults/derogatory comments/mockery directed at the individual or a third party, openly or covertly; (2) being yelled at; (3) threats of physical harm or violence directed at the individual or a third party; and finally (4) physical infringements on personal boundaries and/or territories real or perceived. The findings of the study suggest that the actions identified by the respondents as their rationales for participating in violent confrontations are largely consistent with behaviors, verbalizations and/or gestures that they defined as being disrespectful. Findings deduced from this study resulted in the construction of a model of how disrespect potentially leads to violent confrontations. Subsequent to the research this study contrasts its findings with the subculture of violence theory postulated by Wolfgang and Ferracuti (1967), thereby demonstrating the need for an expansion of the initial corollaries. / Ph. D.

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.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / In 1922, George Tompkins was found dead in an isolated area of Riverside Park. Though the media and evidence present pointed to Tompkins having been the victim of a lynching, the official ruling was that of suicide. Almost a century later, a multiracial, driven group of individuals set out to memorialize Tompkins as a victim of lynching and challenge the ruling that he had taken his own life. In discussing deaths such as George Tompkins’, it is vital to remind oneself that the victims of lynchings were more than just statistics in the ongoing epidemic of anti-Black violence that has permeated the history of the United States. By employing a victim-centered methodology, we can examine the lives of these victims before the worst happened to them and recognize the three-dimensionality of their lived experiences. This work examines the lived experience, lynching death, and memorialization process one hundred years later of George Tompkins. In understanding the means by which he lived, died, and was remembered, we can better understand the ways that this process can play a role in multiple contemporary communities.

My dissertation argues that African Americans in the 20th-century connected lynching and other acts of racial violence with Christ's crucifixion, which in turn fostered hope and even interracial amity by linking his resurrection with racial uplift. To illustrate this dynamic, I focus on musician, dramatist, and church leader Willa Saunders Jones (1901-79) and her Passion play, which she wrote in Chicago during the 1920s. Over the course of six decades, Jones produced her play annually in churches and later large civic theaters. Growing in size and splendor, the play remained intimately tied with the Black church. It also bore the impress of Jones's cultural training in Little Rock, Arkansas and Chicago, the city to which her family fled after a transforming brush with racial violence. The rise of her Passion play depended upon her musical success, most notably as a choral director. By focusing on a single cultural product over time and through several disciplinary lenses, my study contributes new insights into the role of sacred music and drama within the African American community. Offering a brief overview of Jones and her play, my Introduction also articulates the dissertation's two central organizing concepts: the crucifixion trope and resurrection consciousness. Chapters One and Two explain why Americans, especially of African descent, made a link between the suffering of black men in America and the crucifixion of Christ (the crucifixion trope). Chapters Three and Four indicate why Jones considered sacred music and drama to be agents of racial uplift and interracial amity. The final chapter focuses on the theme of Christ's resurrection as a metaphor that animates certain responses to racial trauma (resurrection consciousness). In addition to a wide range of secondary sources, I draw upon personal interviews, court records, genealogical records, the Black press, visual images, song lyrics, correspondence, autobiographies, plays, playbills, school records, television footage, and church publications of the National Baptist Convention, USA. "Windy City, Holy Land" should be of special interest to scholars in African American Studies, American Studies, History, Religious Studies, Theatre Studies, and Women's Studies.

Social work imagines itself as a site of goodness and justice. My thesis illustrates the ways in which commitments to the profession’s social justice-oriented ideals are ruptured when racialized social workers name the operation of racism within everyday sites of professional practice. I show how colonial and imperial constructions of helping (moral superiority and goodness) continue to shape the hegemonic scripts about the role and practices of social work, reinscribing white dominance in social work knowledge production. Historically, racialized bodies have been constituted as Others, subjects to be regulated, controlled and ‘saved’ within the colonial project. I examine the dilemmas that emerge when racialized Others become the helpers and attempt to perform a normative identity that is constructed through white dominance. In this study, I provide a detailed analysis of twenty-three semi-structured interviews with racialized social workers. I trace the production of the profession’s values and notions of good practice within their narratives. I specifically explore the moments in which ‘good’ practice and commitments to the values of the profession break down in everyday work with clients and co-workers. Racist encounters with clients appear as overwhelming occurrences within workers’ narratives, and a complex paradox is revealed: the discursive arrangements within social work that constitute good, social justice-oriented practice, are the very same discourses that disavow the operation of racism. Within these moments workers are left questioning whether or not they can be ‘good social workers’ because the act of naming racism appears to be incompatible with their commitments to the values that shape what is recognized as good social work practice. The narratives presented in this thesis point to the trespasses, erasures and individualizing discourses that secure whiteness at the exact moments in which race is made invisible. I contend that, when workers name racism, their very presence is destabilizing to a social work profession that needs to construct an image of itself as a site of goodness. Social work must examine the colonial continuities that construct contemporary practices, and to make visible the ways in which hegemonic scripts shaping justice and goodness reinstall whiteness and collude with racism.

Social work imagines itself as a site of goodness and justice. My thesis illustrates the ways in which commitments to the profession’s social justice-oriented ideals are ruptured when racialized social workers name the operation of racism within everyday sites of professional practice. I show how colonial and imperial constructions of helping (moral superiority and goodness) continue to shape the hegemonic scripts about the role and practices of social work, reinscribing white dominance in social work knowledge production. Historically, racialized bodies have been constituted as Others, subjects to be regulated, controlled and ‘saved’ within the colonial project. I examine the dilemmas that emerge when racialized Others become the helpers and attempt to perform a normative identity that is constructed through white dominance. In this study, I provide a detailed analysis of twenty-three semi-structured interviews with racialized social workers. I trace the production of the profession’s values and notions of good practice within their narratives. I specifically explore the moments in which ‘good’ practice and commitments to the values of the profession break down in everyday work with clients and co-workers. Racist encounters with clients appear as overwhelming occurrences within workers’ narratives, and a complex paradox is revealed: the discursive arrangements within social work that constitute good, social justice-oriented practice, are the very same discourses that disavow the operation of racism. Within these moments workers are left questioning whether or not they can be ‘good social workers’ because the act of naming racism appears to be incompatible with their commitments to the values that shape what is recognized as good social work practice. The narratives presented in this thesis point to the trespasses, erasures and individualizing discourses that secure whiteness at the exact moments in which race is made invisible. I contend that, when workers name racism, their very presence is destabilizing to a social work profession that needs to construct an image of itself as a site of goodness. Social work must examine the colonial continuities that construct contemporary practices, and to make visible the ways in which hegemonic scripts shaping justice and goodness reinstall whiteness and collude with racism.