Religious leaders were key figures within African American society in the late antebellum South. They undertook a vital religious function within both the plantation slave community and the institutionalised biracial and independent black church and many became a focal point for African American Christianity amongst slaves and free blacks. These religious leaders also took on a number of secular responsibilities, becoming counsellors, mediators, and advisors, individuals that blacks would frequently seek out for their opinion, advice and solace. African American religious leaders held a position considered to be vital and prestigious. But such a position was also perilous. Black religious leaders had to reconcile the conflicting demands of two groups whose needs were almost diametrically opposed. Slaves and free blacks wanted to hear a message of hope, but the Southern elite wanted to hear a message of obedience to ensure that their authority remained unchallenged. Appeasing both groups was an almost impossible task. Failing to meet their demands, however, could be disastrous for black religious leaders. Slaves and free blacks who heard a message of obedience to the Southern white elite rejected the authority of the black preacher, who was then often unable to continue his ministrations. Conversely, those who were considered to be teaching a message that was undermining the planter's authority faced reprisals from white society. These reprisals could be violent. In order to survive, black religious leaders had to chart a difficult course between the two groups, giving a sense of hope to the enslaved but in a manner that did not appear to undermine white authority. Within historical scholarship, it has been argued that African American religious leaders shared a common role. By the late antebellum period, however, a divide had emerged amongst black religious leaders. Although they continued to share many of the same goals, responsibilities, and challenges, the form of Christianity practiced by black preachers on the plantation was not the same as that practiced by licensed black ministers in the biracial and independent black church. Christianity within the plantation slave community continued to include African traditions and rituals that had survived the transatlantic crossing. Christianity within the biracial and independent black church, however, had begun to reject these African traditions as backward and outdated, and had moved instead towards a form of religion that, whilst still emotional and uplifting, was also more formal and hierarchical, resembling the Christianity of white Southern evangelicals.Black preachers and licensed black ministers were preaching Christianity in the face of adversity and had the potential to become political leaders within the African American community. The realisation of this potential was hindered, not only by the constant supervision of these religious leaders by the white elite but also through the refusal of black preachers and ministers to use Christianity to justify acts of resistance. This research adds new insight to the role of African American religious leaders through a detailed understanding of their different approaches in delivering the Christian message.

Black men and women were the victims of verbal abuse, neglect, intimidation, rape, physical assault, lynching, and other manifestations of violence in both the late antebellum and postemancipation South. This dissertation reconstructs how the newly freed black population experienced racialized violence during the transition from slavery to freedom and in the decades immediately following emancipation. By analyzing primary source collections that chronicle the transitional period between slavery and freedom, it is possible to frame resistance to racialized violence as part of a continuum. The struggle to combat racialized violence, I argue, was conditioned by the experiences of black men and women during slavery. This dissertation, then, highlights the continuities that existed in a period of apparent discontinuity. To reconstruct the experiences of black men and women, this dissertation also reconceptualizes how we think about violence and resistance. There is a tendency among scholars who study racialized violence to equate violence with the use of physical force. This dissertation, however, defines violence as the use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment, or deprivation. By adopting a definition of violence that is broader than those used in most existing studies of racialized violence, it becomes possible to understand the long-term, psychological, and developmental impact of racialized violence on black men and women. Resistance, similarly, must be understood in broader terms to include acts that are not explicitly recognized as resistance by those involved, but that informed observers might perceivably recognize as thwarting an attempt at subjugation. The reality is that overt resistance was dangerous for African Americans, and so many turned towards clandestine methods of resistance to voice their opposition. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This dissertation examines how black men and women experienced racialized violence during the transition from slavery to freedom and in the decades immediately following emancipation. The struggle to combat racialized violence, I argue, was conditioned by the experiences of black men and women during slavery. By adopting and transforming resistance techniques developed to oppose slavery, the newly freed black population found ways to contest subjugation. To reconstruct the experiences of black men and women, this dissertation also reconceptualizes how we think about violence and resistance. It moves beyond the equation of violence with physical force, and instead recognizes that acts of violence can result from an imbalance of power. Resistance, similarly, should be understood in broader terms to include acts that are not explicitly recognized as resistance by those involved, but that informed observers might reasonably perceive as thwarting attempts at subjugation.

African American history and how it is taught in classroom spaces have been a point of contention with activists, historians, and educators for decades. In it current form, African American history narratives often are ambiguous and truncated, leaving students with a disjointed construction about U.S. history. Additionally, the pedagogical decisions made by teachers regarding African American history are sometimes problematic. To fix this problem, critical scholars have surmised that both pre- and in-service teachers need to be more knowledgeable about African American history. This knowledge will help teachers move past simplistic constructions of the past and provide a transformative educational experience. In essence, these scholars believe that teachers cannot teach [African American history] because they do not know it. This study, however, examines what if they do know [African American history], will they teach it? The purpose of this study was to investigate how knowledge influences teachers’ pedagogical decisions. Using the theoretical and conceptual frameworks of cultural memory and knowledge construction, this qualitative case study explores how four pre-service teachers interpreted African American history after engaging in a summer reading program and how that knowledge was implemented in their classroom during their student teaching semester. The reader, entitled A Winding River, was a collection of scholarly journal articles, book chapters, and primary and secondary source documents. Data collection measures included three classroom observations, reflective journals, three interviews, and other classroom documents related to the participant’s student teaching experience. Findings indicate that knowledge acquisition is complex and the process to teach is a generative process. Although knowledge is an important component in teaching, sociocultural factors also influenced the divergent ways African American history was interpreted and taught. The study indicates that the access of African American history is not always a prerequisite in teaching the subject in transformative ways. / text

Rethinking Our Outlines/ Redrawing Our Maps: Representing African Agency in the Antebellum South 1783-1829 The lenses through which our common perceptions of African/Black agency in the antebellum period are viewed, synthetic textbooks and maps, rarely reveal the tremendous number of liberating acts that characterized the movements of Black people in the South from 1783 to 1829. During the American Revolution, 80,000 to 100,000 such enslaved Africans threw off their yokes and escaped their bondage. Subsequently, large numbers embarked on British ships as part of the Loyalist exodus from the United States, while others fled to the deep South, to Native lands, to the North, or held their ground right where they were, attempting, as maroons, to establish themselves and survive as free persons. While recent historical scholarship has identified many of the primary sources and themes that characterize such massive levels of proactivity, few have tried to present them as a synthetic whole. This applies to maps used to illustrate the African American history of those regions and times as well. Illustrating these movements defines the scope of this scholarly work entitled Rethinking Our Outlines/ Redrawing Our Maps: Representing African Agency in the Antebellum South 1783-1829. This work also critically looks at several contemporary maps of this period published in authoritative atlases or textbooks and subsequently creates three original maps to represent the proactive movements and relationships of Africans during this period. / African American Studies

This dissertation explores the memories and motivations of women who helped mold Pan-African cultural nationalism through challenging, refining, and reshaping organizations influenced by Kawaida, the black liberation philosophy that gave rise to Kwanzaa. This study focuses on female advocates in the Us Organization, Committee for a Unified Newark and the Congress of African People, the East, and Ahidiana. Emphasizing the years 1965 through the mid-to-late 1980s, the work delves into the women’s developing sense of racial and gender consciousness against the backdrop of the Black Power Movement. The study contextualizes recollections of women within the groups’ growth and development, ultimately tracing the organizations’ weakening, demise, and influence on subsequent generations. It examines female advocates within the larger milieu of the Civil Rights Movement’s retrenchment and the rise of Black Power. The dissertation also considers the impact of resurgent African-American nationalism, global independence movements, concomitant Black Campus, Black Arts, and Black Studies Movements, and the groups’ struggles amidst state repression and rising conservatism. Employing oral history, womanist approaches, and primary documents, this work seeks to increase what is known about female Pan-African cultural nationalists. Scholarly literature and archival sources reflect a dearth of cultural-nationalist women’s voices in the historical record. Several organizational histories have included the women’s contributions, but do not substantially engage their backgrounds, motives, and reasoning. Although women were initially restricted to “complementary” roles as helpmates, they were important in shaping and sustaining Pan-African cultural-nationalist organizations by serving as key actors in food cooperatives, educational programs, mass communications pursuits, community enterprises, and political organizing. As female advocates grappled with sexism in Kawaida-influenced groups, they also developed literature, programs, and organizations that broadened the cultural-nationalist vision for ending oppression. Women particularly helped reformulate and modernize Pan-African cultural nationalism over time and space by resisting and redefining restrictive gender roles. As such, they left a legacy of “kazi leadership” focused on collectivity, a commitment to performing the sustained work of bringing about black freedom, and centering African and African-descended people’s ideas and experiences.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of History / Sue Zschoche / In the last two decades, the study of postwar American cities has gone through a significant revisionist reinterpretation that overturned an older story of urban decay and decline beginning with the tumultuous 1960s and the notion that a conservative white suburban backlash politics against civil rights and liberalism appeared only after 1966. These new studies have shown that, in fact, American cities had been in jeopardy as far back as the 1940s and that white right-wing backlash against civil rights was also much older than previously thought. This “urban crisis” scholarship also directly rebutted neoconservative and New Right arguments that Great Society liberal programs were at fault for the decline of inner-city African American neighborhoods in the past few decades by showing that the private sector real estate industry and 1930s New Deal housing programs, influenced by biased industry guidelines, caused those conditions through redlining. My case study similarly recasts the history of American inner cities in the last half of the twentieth century. It uses the Greater Kansas City metropolitan area, especially Kansas City, Missouri and Kansas City, Kansas, as a case study. I deliberately chose Kansas City because traditional urban histories and labor histories have tended to ignore it in favor of cities further east or on the west coast. Furthermore, I concur with recent trends in the historical scholarship of the Civil Rights Movement towards more of a focus on northern racism and loczating the beginning of the movement in the early twentieth century. In this study, I found evidence of civil rights activism in Kansas City, Missouri as far back as the late 1860s and 1870s. I trace the metropolitan area’s history all the way back to its antebellum beginnings, when slavery still divided the nation and a national railroad system was being built. I weave both labor and changes in transportation over time into the story of the city and its African-American population over time.

This thesis explores the relationship between black gospel music and the African American freedom struggle of the post-WWII era. More specifically, it addresses the paradoxical suggestion that black gospel artists themselves were typically escapist, apathetic, and politically uninvolved—like the black church and black masses in general—despite the “classical” Southern movement music being largely gospel-based. This thesis argues that gospel was in fact a critical component of the civil rights movement. In ways open and veiled, black gospel music always spoke to the issue of freedom. Topics include: grassroots gospel communities; African American sacred song and coded resistance; black church culture and social action; freedom songs and local movements; socially conscious or activist gospel figures; gospel records with civil rights themes.

Contained in this thesis is an annotated edition of the correspondence between the African-American leaders W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. Du Bois and Washington would go on to become rivals, their philosophies of education and racial uplift diverging from one another. Du Bois favored vocal protest and higher education, while Washington preferred a gradual approach of vocational education and economic advancement. However, this correspondence sees them attempting, albeit unsuccessfully, to work together. Covering the decade between 1894 and 1904, the letters touch on a variety of political, social, and educational topics at a crucial time for race relations in America. The differences between the two men that would lead to their split - age, regional origin, education, philosophy - are seen in the correspondence, but so too is a spirit of cooperation. These themes are explored in an introductory essay, while other more specific contextual details are provided in the footnotes accompanying the letters. The many individuals mentioned by Du Bois and Washington are annotated, allowing the reader a fuller understanding of the social world of black activism at the turn of the twentieth century. Narrative material is provided to help bridge the gap between letters, and a timeline detailing the relationship between the two men is also included. While some of these letters have been published before, their presentation as part of an annotated correspondence allows for a greater understanding of this primary source material.

This study examines the pathways of two Atlanta, Georgia African-American women social activists, Dorothy Lee Bolden Thompson and Ruby Parks Blackburn, and their respective organizations, two unsung heroes that some history books failed to give the proper recognition that they so deserved. It encompasses the challenges, civic work, social justice, and efforts as they emerged as social activists. Additionally, this study is based on the premise that these noteworthy Southern African-American women’s social activist organizations, The Georgia League of Negro Women Voters as founded by Ruby Parks Blackburn and the National Domestic Union established by Dorothy Lee Bolden made a major impact in the Atlanta area. Although they were both from two totally different lifestyles, it is without a doubt that these two fearless women originators of very successful organizations were instrumental in joining together African-American citizens of Atlanta Georgia.

As education focuses increasingly on standards based assessment, social studies must be examined for its integration of Black History in the United States History curriculum. Using a Critical Race Theory lens, this directed content analysis attempts to examine the Florida Standards for United States History to determine if and how Black History is integrated into United States History courses. The study also makes use of Banks’ (1994) “levels of integration” to explore the degree to which this is accomplished. In addition, lesson plans created and/or endorsed by the state of Florida are analyzed for their inclusion of Black History. Data and analysis from this study demonstrate that while Black History is integrated to varying degrees across the K-12 United States History Florida Standards, the “levels of integration” (Banks, 1994) and topics covered do not offer a complete historical narrative. Similarly, while the lesson plans approved by the state of Florida often reflect a higher “level of integration” (Banks, 1994) and historical understanding, the limited topics of slavery and the Civil Rights Movement prevent students from seeing the development of Black History across the continuum of United States History. Further, the findings suggest that standards should be developed that directly address the role race and racism play in the development of the United States. These findings can be useful to both administrators and teachers looking to develop standards which help form an accurate historical understanding of the development of the United States. The study recommends that United States History courses and state standards in United States History focus on the role racism has played in developing the United States, include the voices of people of color, and focus on social justice in the United States History curriculum