The value of Black students knowing about their history has been well-established within the scholarly literature on the teaching and learning of African American history. There is a paucity of empirical studies, however, that examine how exposure to this knowledge informs students’ historical and contemporary understandings. Framed by the theory of collective memory, the purpose of this study was to investigate how two teachers’ contrasting representations of African American history shaped student’ understanding of the Black past and its relationship to the experiences of Black Americans today. To examine this, I conducted an ethnographic study at two school sites that each required students to complete a year-long course on African American history. The participants in this study were two groups of Black high school students and their respective African American history teacher. Analysis of data derived from classroom observations, student and teacher interviews and curricular artifacts (e.g., reading materials, handouts, assessments and writing samples) indicate that teachers’ representations of African American history shaped students’ understandings in distinctive ways. This study contributes to the existing literature by examining students’ interpretations of the Black experience in relation to two teachers’ competing narratives on the meaning and significance of African American history. Findings from this study suggest that we must go beyond advocating for inclusion of African American history curricula and work toward ensuring this is being taught in a way that is relevant and meaningful for students. / Urban Education

The problem of this study was to ascertain the status of the teaching of Negro history in American history classes in the public high schools of Texas.

In this study, seven rap songs by hip hop icon Tupac Shakur were examined to determine if the ideology of the Black Panther Party exists within the song lyrics of his politically oriented music. The study used content analysis as its methodology. Key among the Ten Point Program tenets reflected in Tupac’s song lyrics were for self-determination, full employment, ending exploitation of Blacks by Whites (or Capitalists), decent housing, police brutality, education, liberation of Black prisoners, and the demand for land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, peace, and a United Nations plebiscite.

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.

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.

<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>

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.

The goal of this essay is to look at the poems “The Weary Blues” and “JAZZTETMUTED” (hereafter to be referred to as “JAZZTET”) by Langston Hughes andexamine their relationships to both the blues and jazz structurally, lyrically, andthematically. I examine the relationship of blues and jazz to the African-Americancommunity of Harlem, New York in the 1920’s and the 1950’s when the poems wererespectively published. Integral to any understanding of what Hughes sought toaccomplish by associating his poetry so closely with these music styles are the contexts,socially and politically, in which they are produced, particularly with respect to theAfrican-American experience.I will examine Hughes’ understanding of not only the sound of the two stylesof music but of what the music represents in the context of African-American historyand how he combines these to effectively communicate blues and jazz to the page. / <p>A</p>