The Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) and the Federal Writers' Project were two government survey programs from the 1930s that, in part, documented slavery in America. Historically stakeholders utilized these resources in isolation of one another. Coordination between the two programs in this study has identified five documented slave houses from the HABS collection that are directly linked to a slave narrative recorded by the Writers' Project. The slave narrative brings to life the spatial density, degree of accommodations, nature of the facilities, and attitudes of those who inhabited the slave house. The relationship between the historical record and the stories of the inhabitants is crucial to our understanding and interpretation of the lifeways and settings of enslaved African Americans in the Antebellum South. Historic preservationists now have five personal accounts of the historic plantation landscape upon which to build future interdisciplinary appreciation and research.

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.

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. 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. 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, Armwoodʹs 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.

Progress Village, a historically Black neighborhood outside of Tampa, FL, encountered structural violence that included construction of an adjacent phosphogypsum stack. Why the neighborhood signed a legal agreement with the stack’s operating industry and the impacts of this decision provides a lesson in critical environmental justice. Theories of urban political ecology frame exploration of resident priorities, relationships with industry, risk perceptions, and health concerns. Utilizing activist anthropology, this thesis aims to be mutually beneficial to scholarly and neighborhood development. Ultimately, this research demonstrates how southern gradualism, racism, and a trend towards isolationism created today’s striving, yet marginalized and divided community. This thesis encourages scholarship on everyday resident-industry interactions and provides insights to strengthen future Community Benefits Agreements, while questioning if such agreements serve environmental justice.

This dissertation is the first comprehensive study of “everyday” racial violence in the postbellum South. Taking as its focus the states of Louisiana and Kentucky, One Dead Freedman juxtaposes the practical enactment of black citizenship against daily racial terrorism by incorporating personal, familial, and community testimony left behind by African Americans who had a direct experience with such violence. Within this dissertation, the terminology of “everyday violence” is employed to differentiate the more mundane forms of white violence from the more spectacular forms of Reconstruction-era violence such as lynching, the Ku Klux Klan, and race riots. Thus, the definition of everyday violence includes anything from verbal threats all the way to the brutal beatings, whippings, and murders that were so commonplace as to not draw attention from the local and national media. One Dead Freedman is organized both thematically and chronologically, and it examines everyday racial violence in five distinct “spaces”: military enlistment; the workplace; the household; schools; and voting stations. This dissertation pays close attention to what each of these spaces meant to black Southerners during the first years of emancipation, and, then, digs into what forms, or types, of violence were utilized by white Southerners in each. One Dead Freedman concludes that white Southerners used racial violence in an effort to circumscribe the practical enactment of black citizenship on a daily basis during Reconstruction. This violence was, ironically, both pervasive and diffuse, and served to undercut the position of African Americans in the South, and America at large, far beyond 1877 by limiting black mobility and autonomy in both private and public spaces in which African Americans defined the meaning of their own freedom. The persistence of this violence, and its legacy, was central to the enduring power of racism in America through the Civil Rights Movement and even into modern America.

<p>  </p> <p>This dissertation explores how Black and white, men and women in ex-Confederate states physically recreated or created their environment after four long years of war. Through rebuilding and building homes, businesses, churches, jails, and infrastructure, southerners remade their landscape in a way that reflected their aspirations and fears for life in the postwar South, and in ways that reflected expectations about new alliances and relationships. For instance, white southerners used their kinship networks as well as state governments to rebuild jails, courthouses, and grand churches to reconsolidate their elite, Old South status. This process of rebuilding has received little attention from historians, and the existing literature has instead emphasized the social, political, and economic narratives of the Reconstruction Era. While that scholarship is essential to understand the contentious and fraught nature of the period, the unexplored story of rebuilding adds to these histories by recovering the motivations of the laborers and financiers who rebuilt the South after the Civil War. In addition, this project illuminates how Black and white southerners tried to exert control and influence over their space and place in the postwar world, and in doing so, reveals that the work of rebuilding mattered just as much to southerners as did the political reunification and Reconstruction of the Union. More broadly, it posits the process of rebuilding as a moment of transition for both the South and the nation, as it bridged the gap between the Old and New South, wartime and peacetime, and the Civil War and Reconstruction Eras.  </p>

America's National Historic Preservation Act promotes the conservation of irreplaceable sites such as Nicodemus, Kansas, an African American town founded by former slaves in 1877. The collaboration of the National Park Service (NPS) and civic partners is essential to meet the goal of preserving historic properties in Nicodemus and other minority communities. Although the NPS designated 5 Nicodemus buildings as a National Historic Site (NHS) in 1996, the few remaining residents struggle to preserve the site and attract visitors. The purpose of this ethnographic study was to explore the effects of NPS policies related to African American historic and cultural preservation. Research questions focused on the consequences of the NHS designation in Nicodemus and options for NPS policy improvement. This study was inspired by Innes and Booher's theory of complex adaptive systems and consensus building. Data were collected through interviews with 11 residents, educators, and representatives of the NPS. These data were inductively coded and then subjected to thematic analysis. Key findings indicate concerns about limited resources, NPS open competition hiring policies that do not promote the long-term employment of Nicodemus descendant-residents in spite of their ability to recount oral histories, a need for cross-cultural training in the NPS, and the inadequate promotion of the Nicodemus NHS. This study may lead to positive social change by emphasizing the need for the NPS to collaborate with the descendants and long-term residents of rural communities to preserve the historical legacy of African Americans and emphasize the strength of our nation's diversity.

In this re-evaluation of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, I identify the original causes that made the Study emerge, examine why the intent of this research shifted over time, reveal the manner in which the Study was conducted, expose the role the government played in the manipulation of the Experiment, and, finally, investigate the ways, as well as the reasons, for the selection of the participants involved in the Study. After exploring the Experiment itself, I investigate the lasting effects of it on the community in which it occurred and the ways in which it further affected the relationship between African Americans and the United States Government. I explore the reasons for the involvement of Tuskegee Institute. Also, the philosophies of its founder, Booker T. Washington, are examined to discover the rationale behind the Institution's participation in an Experiment, which eventually became harmful. Finally, I hope to reveal why Tuskegee has been historically omitted from any blame in the Study.

Community is an evolving and complex concept that historians have applied to localities, counties, and the South as a whole in order to ground larger issues in the day-to-day lives of all segments of society. These social networks sometimes unite and sometimes divide people, they can mirror or transcend political boundaries, and they may exist solely within the cultures of like-minded people.This volume explores the nature of southern communities during the long nineteenth century. The contributors build on the work of scholars who have allowed us to see community not simply as a place but instead as an idea in a constant state of definition and redefinition. They reaffirm that there never has been a singular southern community. As editors Steven E. Nash and Bruce E. Stewart reveal, southerners have constructed an array of communities across the region and beyond. Nor do the contributors idealize these communities. Far from being places of cooperation and harmony, southern communities were often rife with competition and discord. Indeed, conflict has constituted a vital part of southern communal development. Taken together, the essays in this volume remind us how community-focused studies can bring us closer to answering those questions posed to Quentin Compson in Absalom, Absalom!: “Tell [us] about the South. What’s it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.” / https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu_books/1290/thumbnail.jpg

This paper examines the experiences of rural black women in Mississippi during the Civil Rights Movement by examining correspondence of the grassroots anti-poverty organization the Box Project. The Box Project, founded in 1962 by white Vermont resident and radical activist Virginia Naeve, provided direct relief to black families living in Mississippi but also opened positive and clandestine lines of communication between southern black women and outsiders, most often white women. The efforts of the Box Project have been largely left out of the dialogue surrounding Civil Rights, which has often been dominated by leading figures, major events and national organizations. This paper seeks to understand the discreet but effective ways in which some black women, though constrained by motherhood, abject poverty, and rural isolation participated in the Civil Rights Movement, and how black and white women worked together to chip away at the foundations of inequality that Jim Crow produced.