A career as a police officer has served as a legitimate avenue for many Black Americans to elevate themselves from numerous low paying less prestigious jobs, to a more respectable better paying secured occupation that has a higher social economic status. The general perception related to the civil service position of a police officer, suggests that it is an occupation which should offer an environment free from discrimination and nepotism, thereby allowing fair treatment and equal access for advancement to all individuals employed within the police organization. The concept of a police organization that offers fair treatment and equal access for advancement to all of its employees in a climate that is free from discrimination and nepotism is the subject of considerable skepticism among many black police officers. Police departments throughout the United States of America have been challenged by a highly visible accusation of discrimination and nepotism in regards to the selection process and the police personnel selected to become members of elite police specialty units. This thesis traces the historical involvement of black police officers in The United States and their progression to obtain equality and fair treatment as police officers within the law enforcement community. This thesis examines the racial demographics of eighteen (18) police departments located in various sections of the United States and the racial demographics of the elite police specialty units which are incorporated within each police department. In addition, this thesis will analyze collected data from the police departments that participated in the study and determine if the minority representation within each of the police department's elite police specialty units is equal to the general population which the police departments serve and proportionate to the minority representation within the police department. Finally, this thesis will examine data identifying Black American's representation in significant areas of the criminal justice system, thus analyzing the correlation between Black American's over-representation in the criminal components of the criminal justice system and their under-representation within police departments and elite police specialty units.

This thesis focuses on Hubert Henry Harrison (1883-1927), a Caribbean-born journalist, educator, and community organizer whose historical restoration requires us to expand the frame of Black radicalism in the twentieth century. Harrison was the first Black leader of the Socialist Party of America to articulate a historical materialist analysis of the "Negro question", to organise a Black-led Marxist formation, and to systematically and publicly challenge the party's racial prejudices. In a time of urbanization, migration, lynching, and segregation, he subsequently developed the World War I-era New Negro movement by spearheading its first organisation, newspaper, nation-wide congress, and political party. Harrison pioneered a new form of anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, coloured internationalism. He also inaugurated the socio-cultural tradition of street corner speaking in Harlem, which formed the institutional basis for developing a wide-ranging, working-class, community-based, Black modernist intellectual culture. His people-centred and mass-movement-oriented model of leadership catalysed the rise to prominence of Marcus Garvey and the Garvey movement. Meanwhile, Harrison's African identity and epistemology positioned him to establish an African-centred street scholar tradition in Harlem that endures to this day. Despite Harrison's wide-ranging influence on a whole generation of Black leaders from W.E.B. Du Bois to A. Philip Randolph, his impact and legacy have been largely forgotten. As a result, unearthing and recovering Harrison requires us to rethink multiple histories - the white left, the New Negro movement, Garveyism, the "Harlem Renaissance" - which have marginalized him. Harrison figured centrally in all of these social movements, so restoring his angle of vision demonstrates previously invisible connections, conjunctures, and continuities between disparate and often segregated currents of intellectual and political history. It also broadens the spectrum of Black emancipatory possibilities by restoring an example that retains much of its relevance today.

The purpose of these studies was to examine the predictors of African American and European American adolescents’ attitudes toward affirmative action (Study 1) and school desegregation (Study 2) policies. It was hypothesized that support for both policies would be higher among adolescents who (1) attended more racially diverse classes, (2) held less prejudiced racial attitudes, (3) were more aware of historical and continuing racial inequality and discrimination, (4) described themselves as politically liberal, and (5) had engaged in more racial identity exploration. Participants in both studies included African American and European American adolescents ages 14 to 17 attending a high school in the Midwestern U.S. On the first day of data collection in both studies, adolescents completed assessments of the hypothesized predictor variables in the context of their high school social studies classrooms. On the second day of data collection, adolescents learned about either an affirmative action (Study 1) or a school desegregation (Study 2) policy that had been proposed for their school. Immediately following the policy presentations, adolescents reported their opinions of the policy in open-ended and forced-choice formats. Across studies, results indicated that African American and European American adolescents often held significantly different views of race, racism, and race-related policies. In general, African American adolescents were more aware of racial discrimination, endorsed more positive views about African Americans, and were more supportive of affirmative action and school desegregation policies than European American adolescents. Predictors of individuals’ views of race-related policies also varied by participant race. Among African American adolescents, higher awareness of interracial disparities and discrimination predicted stronger support of affirmative action and school desegregation. Among European American adolescents, in contrast, higher awareness of interracial disparities and discrimination predicted weaker support of affirmative action and school desegregation. More work is needed to examine the origins of differences between African American and European American adolescents’ understanding of, and beliefs about, race in society. / text

On the eve of World War II, the American Red Cross (ARC) excluded African-American blood donors. The instructions from the Army and the Navy implied that the armed forces did not want the allegedly "inferior" blood of Blacks in the veins of "superior" White soldiers. The ARC's exclusionary policy, as mandated by defense officials in the War Department, continued the tradition of relegating African-Americans to second-class citizenship.Black newspaper editors and individual protest leaders on the national and local levels pressured the armed forces to change its blood donor policy. On January 29, 1942, the ARC started to accept blood donations from Blacks but followed a national policy of segregation. The ARC labeled and stored African-American blood donations apart from those of Whites and maintained Jim Crow blood banks throughout the war even though medical experts found no factual basis to differentiate blood by race.This paper examines how Black newspapers and individuals such as Asa Philip Randolph, Walter Francis White, William Henry Hastie, Mabel Keaton Staupers, and the Black community of Indianapolis responded to the ARC's initial policy of exclusion and then segregating AfricanAmerican blood donations. The paper attempts to modify the popular interpretation that the war constituted a watershed for African-Americans. My research indicates that while many Black leaders and protest organizations on the national and local levels challenged the ARC's blood donor policies, African-Americans did not win a fundamental change in military policy. Thus, while the fight against blood donor discrimination was a manifestation of the wartime "Double V" campaign it also represented its limitations.The paper draws on secondary sources, African-American newspapers, and the manuscript collections of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses, Claude A. Barnett, William Henry Hastie, Asa Philip Randolph, and the Indianapolis Area Chapter of the ARC as well as the papers of African-American physicians in Indianapolis, Walter H. Maddux and Harvey N. Middleton of the Flanner House and the Morgan Health Center. / Department of History

Since his rise to fame in the late nineteenth century, Booker T. Washington has been incorrectly labeled a compromiser and power-hungry politician who sacrificed social progress for his own advancement. Through extensive research of Washington's personal papers, speeches, and affiliations, it has become apparent that the typical characterizations of Washington are not based exclusively in fact. The paper opens with an overview of Washington's philosophy, followed by a discussion of Washington's rise to power and consolidation of his "Tuskegee Machine," and finally the split that occurred within the African-American community with the formation of the NAACP. The thesis concludes that, while Washington's tactics were different from and far less visible than those of more militant black leaders, they were nonetheless effective in the overall effort.

This study analyzes the confirmation hearings discourse of Clarence Thomas and George Bush. Language constructs social reality. The United States has a history of racism and this history manifests itself in our language. The discourse of Clarence Thomas and George Bush created a social reality that equated opposition to Thomas' confirmation with racism using rhetorical strategies that included metaphor and narrative construction.

This thesis includes two background chapters based largely on secondary works; Chapters I and II trace the historiography of black participation in American military engagements from the American Revolution through the Korean conflict. Chapter III, based largely on primary sources, places emphasis on black resistance and attitudes toward the Vietnam crisis. Evidence indicates that the Vietnam era of black protest was not unique but was an evolutionary process that had its roots in other periods in American history. Some blacks questioned their involvement in each American military conflict from the American Revolution to Vietnam.

The visualization of recent episodes regarding apparently unjustifiable deaths of minorities, caused by police and federal law enforcement agencies, has been amplified through today's social media and television networks. Such events may seem to imply that issues concerning racial inequalities in America are getting worse. However, we do not know whether such indications are factual; whether this is a recent phenomenon, whether racial inequality is escalating relative to earlier decades, or whether it is better in certain regions of the nation compared to others. We have built a semantic engine for the purpose of querying statistics on various metropolitan areas, based on a database of individual deaths. Separately, we have built a database of demographic data on poverty, income, education attainment, and crime statistics for the top 25 most populous metropolitan areas. These data will ultimately be combined with government data to evaluate this hyp othesis, and provide a tool for predictive analytics. In this thesis, we will provide preliminary results in that direction. The methodology in our research consisted of multiple steps. We initially described our requirements and drew data from numerous datasets, which contained information on the 23 highest populated Metropolitan Statistical Areas in the United States. After all of the required data was obtained we decomposed the Metropolitan Statistical Area records into domain components and created an Ontology/Taxonomy via Protege to determine an hierarchy level of nouns towards identifying significant keywords throughout the datasets to use as search queries. Next, we used a Semantic Web implementation accompanied with Python programming language, and FuXi to build and instantiate a vocabulary. The Ontology was then parsed for the entered search query and returned corresponding results providing a semantically organized a nd relevant output in RDF/XML format. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.S.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2015. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Chinese female immigrants were active cultural contributors and participants in nineteenth century America, yet Americans often simplified their roles into crude stereotypes and media symbols. The early western accounts concerning females in China created the fundamental images that were the basis of the later stereotypes of women immigrants. The fact that a majority of the period's Chinese female immigrants became prostitutes fueled anti-Chinese feelings. This thesis investigates the general existence of Chinese prostitutes in nineteenth century America and how they were portrayed in the media. American attitudes toward white women and their images of Chinese women created the stereotype of all Chinese female immigrants as immoral. Thus, they became unconscious pawns of nineteenth century American nativist forces wanting to limit and prevent Chinese immigration based on prejudicial and racist attitudes.

I began this project with the question of how today's social justice activists might find a useable history in a massively influential text like Eyes on the Prize. Thus, the broad question that motivated this rhetorical inquiry was: what means are available to people interested in social change, but whose access to the resources to influence society is limited? One important resource that oppressed peoples can lay claim to is a shared sense of the past. Through a critical analysis of Eyes on the Prize, this dissertation examines shared memory as a resource for rhetorical production. I am interested not only in how the past is re-presented in the documentary, but also what resources the documentary provides its audience to consider and take action for social change. The films present memories that complicate or run counter to the dominant narrative of the black freedom struggle and thereby make available a reservoir of rhetoric power for a political present. My analysis suggests that Eyes on the Prize does not contradict public memory's dominant values of the black freedom struggle, but it does resist their blind adherence. The documentary does not force viewers to take sides on divisive issues like separation/integration or violence/nonviolence. Instead it allows them to realize that these concepts are dialectical. These are, in my estimation, productive tensions. Eyes on the Prize is an excellent pedagogical tool for producing citizen activists. Although activism gives way to electoralism by the end of the documentary, activism is portrayed positively in the documentary. There are certainly costs to activism, as some activists experienced in the most extreme way. However, the heroes of Eyes on the Prize are certainly the activists. In an analysis of a text's rhetorical potential, it is also necessary to acknowledge how the text limits rhetorical possibility. Significantly, Eyes on the Prize inadequately addresses the importance of class in the black freedom struggle. The lacuna of class in the documentary neglects fundamental changes in the goals and tactics of the black freedom struggle and limits the material and psychological structures that maintain racism. / text