Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of History, 2006. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Nov. 17, 2008). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-12, Section: A, page: 4659. Adviser: John H. Hanson.

In November 1852, Frederick Douglass composed The Heroic Slave , a novella about Madison Washington's leadership of the 1841 Creole insurrection. In the novella, Douglass attempted to justify his adoption of political methods to the antislavery community. As literary models for his story, Douglass drew on portraits of heroic slaves in his own autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845), Harriet B. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin; Or, Life among the Lowly (1852), Lord Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812–18), and the deposition of the Creole crew, called the “New Orleans Protest” (1841). The result was an intertextual conversation among Douglass, Stowe, Byron, and the Creole crew, which Douglass used to initiate a series of autobiographical revisions. Reading The Heroic Slave as an intertextual conversation offers an alternative to the current practice of assigning this work either to the genre of fiction or to the slave narrative, which has subordinated discussion of the historical context for the story's composition to contemporary attempts to theorize the genre of autobiography. An intertextual reading shows that Douglass was developing a notion of political discourse and action based on friendship as an alternative to Stowe's emphasis on moral reform based on sympathy. Douglass's emphasis on friendship in the novella was, in part, a response to his collaboration with Gerrit Smith, whom he helped elect to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1852, and the novella reflects Douglass's intellectual and professional development from 1847 to 1852, a period to which his latter autobiographies give relatively little attention. Writing a history of Madison Washington's participation in the Creole rebellion for an audience who had, largely, forgotten the event, offered Douglass the opportunity to examine the connection between enslavement and erasure from national history. His novella attempted to reverse this process by presenting Washington's actions as a battle in an ongoing American revolution.

This dissertation examines the role of Afro-Americans in the U.S. birth control movement in the years between 1918-1942. It argues that Afro-Americans of all classes not only supported the idea of birth control but were also a significant force in shaping the national birth control debate, educating their communities and delivering contraceptives to women. During a period when white advocacy of birth control became increasingly conservative, black birth control advocates advanced a broad, often radical, rationale for contraception. While the black and white communities often worked together to provide services to black women in many locations throughout the country, Afro-Americans worked independently of the national, white dominated birth control organizations. Additionally, the organizational strategies of Afro-American birth control advocates were found to be different from those of their white counterparts. The differences were due, in part, to Afro-Americans' strong community orientation, their belief in each person's right to good health and that the state should provide health care, and their nonhierarchial approach to the "professional's" relationship with other health providers and birth control users.

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<p> &ldquo;Art in the Ashes&rdquo; uncovers the implications of race, place, and class in Los Angeles through an in depth exploration of urban black art centers. By examining a cross-section of creative spaces in the city, including the Watts Towers Arts Center, Compton Communicative Arts Academy, the Inner City Cultural Center, and Brockman Gallery in Leimert Park, this thesis probes the real and imagined meanings associated with these centers&rsquo; social, economic, and cultural geography. In doing so, the work redefines and refines current understandings of the black community in the postwar era, exposing the complicated racial and ethnic partnerships and pressures that grew out of art and activism in the 1960s. Through extensive archival research, secondary source analysis, and personal interviews, &ldquo;Art in the Ashes&rdquo; finds a vibrant and highly diversified black experience and identity in Los Angeles that closely follows issues of economics, geography, racial understanding, politics, and culture.</p>

<p> The Civilian Conservation Corps employed young white and black men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. In 1935 Robert Fechner, the Director of the Civilian Conservation Corps, ordered the segregation of Corps camps across the country. Massachusetts&rsquo; camps remained integrated due in large part to low funding and a small African American population. The experiences of Massachusetts&rsquo; African American population present a new general narrative of the Civilian Conservation Corps. The Federal government imposed a three percent African American quota, ensuring that African Americans participated in Massachusetts as the Civilian Conservation Corps expanded. This quota represents a Federal acknowledgement of the racism African Americans faced and an attempt to implement affirmative action against these hardships.</p>

<p> In <i>Dred Scott v. Sandford</i>, Chief Justice Roger Taney spoke for the majority of the United States Supreme Court to declare that Blacks were not constituent members of the American political sovereignty, but rather they were &ldquo;beings of an inferior order, altogether unfit to associate with the white race&rdquo; and they &ldquo;had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.&rdquo; Through engaging in a critical inquiry of constitutional hermeneutics, Blacks looked to the Constitution to deduce their collective identity. However, when they looked in the constitutional mirror, they saw a broken reflection. By evaluating the existential dichotomy of the African-American self-identity revealed in the responses to the <i> Dred Scott</i> decision, this research argues that the African-American self-identity was broken by the Supreme Court&rsquo;s declaration that they were neither citizens nor people under the Constitution; however, in the face of the <i>Dred Scott</i> decision, the African-American self-identity used the very document which denied their right to exist, to galvanize a unique identity capturing their oppression, and the hope to realize their deprived liberty.</p>

<p> Leaders help organizations and cultures not desirous of change to undergo cultural shifts. The current study conducts a textual analysis of six speeches delivered from Montgomery to Memphis in order to extrapolate the sources of his worldview and identify the major arguments used in the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr. who shaped the Civil Rights Movement, an engrained culture, and morally shaped others to lead cultural change. King used a worldview-leadership style to offer cognitive and emotional suppositions to challenge centuries-old presuppositions within both Caucasian and African American cultures. Significant developmental influences changed King&rsquo;s outlook, and as a result he communicated to audiences how to change their worldview. As a young boy, King was determined to hate white people but instead he grew into a reformer committed to nonviolent agape love and articulated moral argumentation from a mosaic of influences. As he encountered multiple cultures of stakeholders each possessing their own set of presuppositions, King expressed a pragmatic patchwork of nearly 70 identifiable sources that appear as core values within his speeches. Forensic textual analysis highlights his core values, consciously and subconsciously expressed, and how he passed the influences along to the audiences. His speeches championed lessons learned from parents, grandparents, experiences, professors, theologians, and Western thinkers to suggest more than a legislative shift but one where society as whole began to adopt a better moral direction. </p><p> <i>Keywords:</i> Leadership, leader, Martin Luther King Jr., change, Civil Rights Movement, worldview, speech, engrained culture, textual analysis, communication, presuppositions.</p>

<p> The development of a Western identity, derivative and evolved from Northern, Midwestern, and Southern identities, played a significant role in determining the loyalty of the Pacific States on the eve of the Civil War. Western identity shared the same tenets as the other sections: property rights, republicanism, and economic and political autonomy. The experiences of the 1850s, though, separated Westerners from the North and the South, including their debates over slavery, black exclusion, and Indian policy. These experiences helped formulate the foundations of a Western identity, and when Southern identity challenged Western political autonomy by the mid-1850s, political violence and antiparty reactions through vigilantism and duels threw Western politics into chaos as the divided Democratic Party, split over the Lecompton Controversy, struggled to maintain control. With the election of 1860, Lincoln's victory in California and Oregon were the result of this chaos, and Westerners remained loyal to the North due to economic ties and Southern challenges to Western political autonomy. On the eve of the Civil War, the West was secured through the efforts of Republicans, but the belief in economic freedom from a slave labor system and federal aid for Indian campaigns played a significant role in forming a Western identity determined to remain in the Union. </p>

<p> Prior to the Civil War, the lives of free African Americans in Fairfax County, Virginia were both ordinary and extraordinary. Using the land as the underpinning of their existence, they approached life using methods that were common to the general population around them. Fairfax was a place that was undergoing a major transition from a plantation society to a culture dominated by self-reliant people operating small farms. Free African Americans who were able to gain access to land were a part of this process allowing them to discard the mantle of dependency associated with slavery. Nevertheless, as much as ex-slaves and their progeny attempted to live in the mainstream of this rural society, they faced laws and stereotypes that the county's white population did not have to confront. African Americans' ability to overcome race-based obstacles was dependent upon using their labor for their own benefit rather than for the comfort and profit of a former master or white employer. </p><p> When free African Americans were able to have access to the labor of their entire family, they were more likely to become self-reliant, but the vestiges of the slave system often stymied independence particularly for free women. Antebellum Fairfax had many families who had both slave and free members and some families who had both white and African American members. These divisions in families more often adversely impacted free African American women who could not rely on the labor of an enslaved husband or the lasting attention of a white male. Moreover, families who remained intact were more likely to be able to care for children and dependent aging members, while free African American females who headed households often saw their progeny subjected to forced apprenticeships in order for the family to survive. </p><p> Although the land provided the economic basis for the survival of free African Americans, the county's location along the border with Maryland and the District of Columbia also played a role in the lives of the county's free African American population. Virginia and its neighbors remained slave jurisdictions until the Civil War, but each government wished to stop the expansion of slavery within its borders. Each jurisdiction legislated against movement of new slaves into their territory and attempted to limit the movement of freed slaves into their jurisdictions. Still, in a compact border region restricting such movement was difficult. African Americans used the differences of laws initially to petition for freedom. As they gained access to the court system, free African Americans expanded their use of the judiciary by bringing their grievances before the courts which sided with the African American plaintiffs with surprising regularity. Although freed slaves and their offspring had few citizenship rights, they were able to use movement across borders and the ability to gain a hearing for their grievances to achieve increasing autonomy from their white neighbors. </p><p> No one story from the archives of the Fairfax County Courthouse completely defines the experience of free African Americans prior to the Civil War, but collectively they chronicle the lives of people who were an integral part of changing Fairfax County during the period. After freedom, many African Americans left Fairfax either voluntarily or through coercion. For those who stayed, their lives were so inter-connected both socially and economically with their white neighbors that any history of the county cannot ignore their role in the evolution of Fairfax.</p>