This thesis examines the 1960’s relocation of over eighty families from the former community of Africville, in the North End of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada into nearby public housing. It investigates the narrative of what was, is, and could perhaps one day be. Rebuilding Africville challenges the idea of re-stitching community and character back to the former site of Africville. The intent of this dissertation is to design multi-owned housing for the site, as well as a central civic structure that will act as the community’s anchor. The homes are designed to be inclusive to three groups of homeowners: former Africville residents, Africville descendants, and new Africville community members who simply have an interest in reestablishing Africville. Rebuilding Africville does not attempt to replicate what once existed over forty years ago; it will, however, attempt to extract elements that were once highlights of Africville and graft them with modern ideas. / Rebuilding Africville follows on the heels of both the United Nations’ recommendation to Canada to consider paying reparations to the former community of Africville, as well as the recent official public apology from Halifax Regional Municipality to former Africville residents.

<p>This dissertation is a social history of the city of Detroit in the 1970s. Using archives official and unofficial - oral histories and archived document collections, self-published memoirs and legal documents, personal papers and the newspapers of the radical press - it portrays a city in flux. It was in the 1970s that the urban crisis in the cities of the United States crested. Detroit, as had been the case throughout the twentieth century, was at the forefront of these changes. This dissertation demonstrates the local social, political, and economic circumstances that contributed to the dramatic increase in prison populations since the 1970s with a focus on the halls of government, the courtroom, and city streets. In the streets, unemployed African American youth organized themselves to counteract the contracted social distribution allocated to them under rapidly changing economic circumstances. They organized themselves for creative expression, protection and solidarity in a hostile city, and to pursue economic endeavors in the informal economy. They sometimes committed crimes. In the courts, Wayne County Juvenile Court Judge James Lincoln, a liberal Democrat long allied with New Deal political alliances, became disenchanted with rehabilitative solutions to juvenile delinquency and embraced more punitive measures, namely incarceration. In city hall, Coleman Young, the city's first African American mayor, confronted this crisis with a form of policing that concentrated predominately on the city's unemployed African American youth, and the result was the criminalization of poverty and race we have come to understand as mass incarceration.</p> / Dissertation

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-11, Section: A, page: 4334. Adviser: Kimberly Shinew. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 188-198) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

This thesis is concerned with the ways in which Ebony magazine sought to recover, popularise and utilise black history between the late 1950s and the late 1980s. The dominant scholarly approach to Ebony has focused on the magazine's bourgeois values and visual aesthetics, and has ignored its importance as a creator and disseminator of black history. By contrast, I highlight the multiple ways in which black history became central to Ebony's content from the late 1950s onwards. Far from viewing Ebony as peripheral to or simply reflective of popular debates into the black past, I place the magazine at the heart of contestations between the corporate, philosophical and political uses of black history during the second half of the twentieth century. In Ebony, this shift was quarterbacked by Lerone Bennett Jr., the magazine's senior editor and in-house historian. Bennett's emergence as a prominent black historian and intellectual, and his increased desire to present history 'from a black perspective', was paralleled by Ebony's broader move from a more politicised to a more market-driven moment. Rooted in my unique position as the first scholar to look at Bennett's unprocessed papers at Chicago State University, and one of the first researchers to examine Bennett's collections at Emory University, this thesis sheds new light on the work of Bennett, on Ebony's significance as a 'history book' for millions of readers, and on the magazine's place at the centre of post-war debates into the form and function of African-American history.

"Journey Toward A Black Aesthetic" is a study of the activist and cultural work of Hoyt W. Fuller and the formation of the Black intellectual community in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. It fills a major gap in Black Arts Movement Studies by exploring the public work of Fuller and the (inter)national sensibilities he helped to arouse among Black intellectuals, artists and activists. Much like the position granted to Alain Locke by scholars of the Harlem Renaissance, this study situates Hoyt Fuller as the "midwife" or "dean" of the Black Arts Movement. One of the central aspects of "Journey Toward A Black Aesthetic" is the way the project explores the various networks Fuller developed at the local, national and international levels. The project traces Fuller's role as editor of Negro Digest (Black World) and First World. It also examines the key part he played as a founder of the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC) in Chicago, and unpacks his position as an unofficial ambassador in several African festivals. The project is based upon extensive archival research, oral history interviews, local periodicals and Black Arts literature. It is an attempt to lobby for an altered view of the movement from the perspective of Hoyt Fuller. As a gay black man, respected elder, engaged activist, leading editor, and passionate advocate for Black writers, Fuller's public work offers us a unique perspective on the 1960s. In sum, this study of his activism will help complement, contradict, and in some instances, transform our understanding of the Black Arts Movement, and the Black intellectual community that was formed in its wake.

Black representation in American animated short films circularly evolved between 1928 and 1954. Blackface minstrelsy at first figured heavily in black representation. The increasing prominence of African-American movie stars and technological improvements in animation led to extremely diverse animated black images in the late 1930s and early 1940s. With the decline of African-American film roles in the 1950s, however, animators fell back to minstrelsy-derived black images. Animated black characterization emerged as blackface changed in the first sound cartoons from a generic cartoon design to an image restricted to black characters. In the early 1930s, cartoon studios began to significantly differentiate black characters from animal characters. Studios focused upon developing characters with strong personalities in the mid-1930s, but black characterizations were mostly derivative of blackface minstrels and black actors. African-American artistic expressions influenced animation during World War II but did not affect the studios' black images. From 1946 to 1954, studios ignored African-American artistry and reverted to past styles of black imaging.

This dissertation examines the sexual dimensions of miscegenation and the effect that it had on the lives of three slave women, their children, and their white slave masters. Chapter 1 explores the historical dynamic concerning the issue of cross-racial relationships in the slave South. Chapter 2 will examine the black female experience under slavery and the dynamics that helped to shape their lives including the issues of race, class and gender. Although we are well aware of the exploitation of slave women, we will also examine how these women used “agency” to resist and to control their day-to-day lives. Chapter 3 revisits the lives of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, which continue to ignite questions concerning their relationship, despite the revelation of the DNA study published in 1998. We will explore Jefferson's behavior, not as a politician, but as a man confronted with issues and choices, as most men are, particularly when the choices concern affairs of the heart. Chapter 4 concerns the dynamics of love, miscegenation, and murder in the lives of George Wythe, Lydia Broadnax, his freed slave woman, and Michael Brown, Lydia's mulatto son. Equally as important is the relationship between Wythe and his closest friend and confidant, Thomas Jefferson, which causes us to question how much Wythe really knew about Jefferson's personal life, particularly with Sally Hemings. Chapter 5 explores the lives of Richard Mentor Johnson, Vice President under Martin Van Buren, his slave Julia Chinn and their two daughters, Imogene and Adalaine. By all standards, their relationship was unusual. Richard lived openly with Julia, his slave, and their children in defiance of the South's social customs and laws. Chapter 6 will conclude with a look back at the significance of resistance in the lives of slave women and how the issue of public vs. private helped to shape relationships that crossed the color line in the slave South. It will show how America historically looked at race and sexuality, and why the color line and cross-racial relationships continue to be a problem in the twenty-first century.

The Black Panther Party existed for a very short period of time, but within this period they established themselves as a central force in the Afrikan American human rights/civil rights movements. Over the past twenty years the history of the Black Panther Party has been conspicuously missing from material on the 1960's. Particularly, there is an absence of material concerning the rank-and-file grassroots activities. In documenting the grassroots efforts of the Black Panther Party, this study emphasizes the community organizing of the Party in a manner which encourages the student/reader to analyze the effectiveness and relevance of grassroots organizing as a means for developing social change and acquiring Afrikan American self-determination.

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