Afro-American Studies Dissertations Collection

Ethel Payne: The First Lady of the Black Press: Black Journalism and Its Advocacy Role from 1954--1991

Watson, Jamal E — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 12:25:14 PST

During the second half of the twentieth century, Ethel Lois Payne emerged as one of the most notable African American journalists in the country. She was best known as the First Lady of the Black Press, and wrote for the Chicago Defender from 1951 to 1978. Her columns were syndicated in dozens of black newspapers across the country. The granddaughter of slaves and the daughter of a Pullman porter, Payne rose to become the nation’s preeminent black female reporter of the civil rights era, chronicling the movement’s seminal moments for a national black readership hungry for stories that could not be found in the white media. From publicly challenging President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s commitment to desegregation in the 1950s, to capturing the lives of black troops in Vietnam in the 1960s, she became known simply as a forceful defender of black civil rights, a vocal critic of colonialism in Africa and Asia and a fierce opponent of American militarism during the Vietnam War. This study examines the intersection between Payne’s role as a journalist and her political stances on civil rights and other issues of social justice. More importantly, this dissertation positions Payne as an important strategist who saw journalism as a vehicle to expose racial injustice, particularly during the turbulent 1950s and 1960s. She remained true to the mission of the black press dating back to 1827 with the publication of Freedom’s Journal. ^

Pen stroking the soul of a people: spiritual foundations of black diasporan literature

Melton, McKinley Eric — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 12:24:56 PST

This project examines the presence of African-derived spiritual ideals within the black literary tradition as a means of highlighting the fundamental influence of spirituality on communities of the modern black diaspora. I begin the discussion with an examination of traditional African spirituality, focusing on Nigerian author Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958). This discussion identifies four core principles of traditional African spirituality that resonate most thoroughly in diasporan communities: the interconnection of sacred and secular spheres, the concept of cyclical rather than linear time, the emphasis on a communal ethos, and the necessity for balance and reconciliation. I then examine the development of what I define as "Black Diasporan Spirituality," considering how these principles, resonating to varying degrees, constitute the basis for a philosophical system defining the universe and the place and role of mankind within it, as understood by African-descended peoples throughout the diaspora. ^ Subsequently, I discuss the ways in which core elements of black spirituality at once inform and are represented in literature produced in Africa and the diaspora. Beginning with an analysis of James Weldon Johnson's God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1927) and Zora Neale Hurston's Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), I examine "Black Diasporan Spirituality" as a defining influence on the black oral tradition, centering my discussion on the cultural articulation of the African American song sermon. Using James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) and The Amen Corner (1954), I then examine the consequences of religious practice in the absence of black spiritual ideals. Focusing on the presence of spirituality in spaces which are not formally designated as religious, I then consider Gloria Naylor's Mama Day (1988) as a narrative that positions "Black Diasporan Spirituality" as vital to the healing processes of black communities, addressing both the trauma and the reconciliation inherent in the construction of diaspora. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that a clear understanding of the nature and character of black spirituality is essential to understanding not only the literature, but also the many circumstances—historical, social and cultural—of the communities out of which each text emerges. ^

In search of the fraternal: Salvific manhood and male intimacy in the novels of James Baldwin

Gibson, Ernest L. — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 11:00:27 PDT

In his 1962 essay "The Creative Process," James Baldwin begins by stating, "Perhaps the primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone." By the 1960s, Baldwin knew all-too-well the state of black male subjectivity in an America fraught with social disharmony. His musings highlight that while the struggles of black manhood can be reduced to discussions of race, class, and/or sexuality, its fate is primarily governed by a subtler phenomenon, namely—this "state of being alone." Baldwin's consideration is a sort of self-dichotomization, as he is at once both artist and man, and while suggesting that the artist must cultivate "loneliness," he also recognizes the necessity for its avoidance. In this regard, James Baldwin as writer emerges as a critical recourse for James Baldwin as man, becomes the medium through which he, through himself and for himself, reaches a particular end. ^ This project examines the male emotion and vulnerability in the novels of James Baldwin. Within his novels, from Go Tell it on the Mountain to Just Above My Head, James Baldwin foregrounds male relationships in a way that exposes fraternal crises. This fraternal crisis, in one vein, points to this project as a theory of space, as it denotes an absence of male intimacy, a state of being where distance, disconnect, unwillingness and fear shape a symbolic space-in-between men. In another sense, it reflects how Baldwin's preoccupation with the state of being alone leads to his fictional pursuit of the fraternal, a metaphysical construction of spatial manhood detectable by intimacy: the vulnerable, emotional and physical closeness of men. Essentially, the search for the fraternal in Baldwin's fiction captures black manhood's cry for male intimacy in a world of isolation, rejection, and oppression while marking the redemptive power of male love through the emergence of salvific manhood.^

Intellect, liberty, life: Women's activism and the politics of black education in antebellum America

Baumgartner, Kabria — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 14:13:06 PDT

During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, academies and seminaries sprang up throughout America, but these institutions excluded African Americans. Around the same time, mobs began destroying schools for African Americans in various cities and towns in the free states and territories. Aware of this struggle over black education, quite a few African American and white women began to mobilize. This dissertation asks why African American and white women joined the struggle for black education and what they thought, said, and did to advance black education at a time of heightened racial hostility in the antebellum North. Drawing on historical methods and feminist theory, this dissertation shows that women were in the vanguard of black education during the antebellum era.^ Some of the women studied in this dissertation are Maria Stewart, Sarah Mapps Douglass, Prudence Crandall, Hannah Barker, Laura Haviland, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Mary Miles Bibb, and Harriet Jacobs. These women educators pursued a range of initiatives, including building primary and secondary schools, establishing voluntary associations, organizing and fundraising, joining the teaching profession, and writing education-themed narratives, to secure educational opportunities for African Americans. Regardless of the particular vehicle for their educational work, some African American and white women educators organized and campaigned to promote equity in American education and to assert the changing status of African Americans in the nation.^ This study also situates women’s activism within the broader movement to abolish slavery, which allows for an analysis of the various discourses on African American education that circulated in the antebellum era. Following the lead of African Americans, women antislavery activists argued that education could help to overthrow the institution of slavery. Hence some women worked to build and strengthen alliances across race, gender, and class lines in order to realize a more inclusive and democratic nation. By examining women’s activism in the struggle for black education, this dissertation renders a dynamic representation of African American and white women as agents and thinkers in the fight against caste, oppression, and slavery.^

"Journey toward a Black aesthetic": Hoyt Fuller, the Black Arts Movement & the Black intellectual community

Fenderson, Jonathan Bryan — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 14:12:33 PDT

"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.^

Where I want to be: African American women's novels and the journey toward selfhood during the Civil Rights and Black Power movements

Jones, Jacqueline M — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 11:49:43 PST

This dissertation examines how contemporary African American women writers have used the novel of selfhood to represent African American girls' and women's struggle to achieve self-understanding and development during the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. In doing so, this dissertation expounds on the ways in which race, class, gender, sexuality, social justice movements, and community affect African American female characters' journey toward selfhood. Through this study I am interested in exploring the messages African American communities communicate to girls and women about life, race, gender, and sexuality. How characters interpret this information and then negotiate between their individual desires and goals and the expectations of their communities, as well as the effect learning about African American or African Diaspora history and culture has on protagonists are also central concerns here. ^ The novels analyzed in this study are Alice Walker's Meridian (1976), Ntozake Shange's Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo (1982), and Toni Morrison's Love (2003). Drawing upon male, female, and African American Bildungsroman scholarship, Civil Rights and Black Power ideology, and black feminist theoretical frameworks, this study offers an interdisciplinary close textual analysis of African American women's novels of selfhood depicting several models of self-development to illuminate the struggles African American women face in their journey toward selfhood. This dissertation diverges from previous scholarship in that it places greater emphasis on the role of community and explores the influence the social justice movements of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, specifically the Civil Rights, Black Power/Black Arts, and Women's liberation movements had on African American women's self-concept. ^

The fight for freedom must be fought on all fronts: "Liberator" magazine and Black radicalism, 1960--1971

Tinson, Christopher Matthew — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 11:48:54 PST

This dissertation investigates the impact of the New York City-based Liberator magazine on the expansion and dissemination of African American political outlooks in the decade between 1960 and 1971. This study explores the history of this magazine as a critical political and cultural formation of these years. Growing out of the tradition of labor, Left-oriented radicalism as well as earlier forms of Black Nationalism at the turn of the 20^th century, the Liberator provided an indispensable forum where many of the national and international concerns facing Black people could be discussed and debated. In its early days as the organ of the short-lived Liberation Committee for Africa and after, Liberator delivered cutting-edge political, social and cultural analyses of Black radicalism. Therefore, in accounting for the transition period between the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power radicalism, I argue that Liberator represents an important example of the strategic efforts of African American intellectuals, artists, and activists to shape autonomous political spaces through the establishment of a radical print culture. ^

Africanizing the Territory: The History, Memory and Contemporary Imagination of Black Frontier Settlements in the Oklahoma Territory

Adams, Catherine Lynn — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 08:42:33 PST

This dissertation articulates the ways in which black (e)migration to the territorial frontier challenges the master frontier narratives as well as African American migration narratives, and to capture how black frontier settlers and settlements are represented in three contemporary novels. I explore through the lens of cultural geography the racialized landscapes of the real and symbolic American South and the real, symbolic and imaginary black territorial frontier. Borrowing perspectives from cultural and critical race studies, I aim to show the theoretical and practical significance of contemporary literary representations of an almost forgotten historical past. Chapter I traces the sites of history, memory and imagination in migration and frontier narratives of enslaved and newly freed black people in the Oklahoma Territory. Chapter II addresses an oppositional narrative of masculinity in frontier narratives depicted in Standing at the Scratch Line by Guy Johnson. Chapter III examines how the black frontier landscape can be created and recreated across three generations who endure racial threats, violence and the razing of Greenwood during the Tulsa Riot of 1921 in Magic City by Jewell Parker Rhodes. Chapter IV scrutinizes the construction of black frontier subjects and exclusive black communities in Paradise by Toni Morrison. My dissertation seeks to add to and expand the literary studies of migration and frontier narratives, taking into account two popular novels alongside a more academically recognized novel. The selected novels mobilize very different resources, but collectively offer insights into black frontier identities and settlements as sites of a past, present and future African American collective consciousness.

"It is a new kind of militancy": March on Washington Movement, 1941-1946

Lucander, David — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 13:53:38 PDT

This study of the March on Washington Movement (MOWM) investigates the operations of the national office and examines its interactions with local branches, particularly in St. Louis. As the organization's president, A. Philip Randolph and members of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) such as Benjamin McLaurin and T.D. McNeal are important figures in this story. African American women such as Layle Lane, E. Pauline Myers, and Anna Arnold Hedgeman ran MOWM's national office. Of particular importance to this study is Myers' tenure as executive secretary. Working out of Harlem, she corresponded with MOWM's twenty-six local chapters, spending considerable time espousing the rationale and ideology of Non-Violent Goodwill Direct Action, a trademark protest technique developed and implemented alongside Fellowship of Reconciliation members Bayard Rustin and James Farmer. As a nationally recognized African American protest organization fighting for a "Double V" against fascism and racism during the Second World War, MOWM accrued political capital by the agitation of its local affiliates. In some cases, like in Washington, D.C., volunteers lacked the ability to forge effective protests. In St. Louis, however, BSCP official T.D. McNeal led a MOWM branch that was among the nation's most active. David Grant, Thelma Maddox, Nita Blackwell, and Leyton Weston are some of the thousands joining McNeal over a three-year period to picket U.S. Cartridge and Carter Carburetor for violating the anti-discrimination clause in Executive Order 8802, lobby Southwestern Bell Telephone to expand employment opportunities for African Americans, stage a summer of sit-ins at lunch counters in the city's largest department stores, and lead a general push for a "Double V" against fascism and racism. This study of MOWM demonstrates that the structural dynamics of protest groups often include a discrepancy between policies laid out by the organization's national office and the activity of its local branches. While national officials from MOWM and National Organization for the Advancement of Colored People had an ambivalent relationship with each other, inter-organizational tension was locally muted as grassroots activists aligned themselves with whichever group appeared most effective. During the Second World War, this was often MOWM.

'Oh! The one who covers her face / surely is not worth much': Identity and social criticism in transatlantic Hispanic culture (1520--1860)

Therriault, Isabelle — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 11:52:30 PDT

In 1639, a law prohibiting women any head covering; veil, mantilla, manto for example, is promulgated for the fifth time in the Iberian Peninsula under the penalty of losing the garment, and subsequently incurring more severe punishments. Regardless of these edicts this social practice continued. My dissertation investigates the cultural representation of these covered women (tapadas) in Spain and the New World in a vast array of early modern literary, historical and legal documents (plays, prose, and regal laws, etc.). Overall, critics associate the use of the veil in the Spanish territories with religious tendencies and overlook the social component of women using the veil to simply explain it as a mere fashion practice. In my dissertation, I argue that it is more than just a garment; the veil was used by women to make political statements, thereby challenging the restrictive gender and identity boundaries of their epoch. A critical analysis of early modern historical and legal peninsular texts and close-readings of Golden Age literary works, together with colonial cultural productions, allow me to identify patterns in how the tapadas were represented both artistically and culturally. Accordingly, my project attempts to reassess the significance of the tapadas in Hispanic culture for 350 years and demonstrate how their resilience to stop using the veil publicly is symptomatic of the absolutist monarchy inefficiencies in imposing social control. I move away from the tendency to investigate works including tapadas exclusively, and I conclude by reconstructing more accurately their cultural impact on the social dynamics in Spain as well as the New World. ^