Black history

Though Gullah Geechee heritage has been recognized by the National Park Service as traditional cultural property (TCP), no known Gullah Geechee property on the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is listed as a TCP. TCPs are properties eligible for NRHP inclusion that ar…

The COVID-19 pandemic, police violence, an expanding surveillance state and contested museum practices constitute a confluence of contemporary crises. As each impacts Black people and intersects with visuality in differing but significant ways, what might be a valuable entry poi…

Black radical feminist organizations of the 1960s to 1980 were born out of the Black liberation and women’s liberation movements. These two movements marginalized Black women as organizers and leaders, as well as erased Black women’s needs within the movements. As a result, Blac…

This micro study of the Akron and Barberton, Ohio, Divisions of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) adds to the understanding the geographic diversity of the Garvey Movement’s expansive reach. It begins to uncover the importance of Garveyism in the Midwest and in …

Public memory on Block Island largely ignores Black and Indigenous labor, life, and legacy. Reclaiming the past and present narratives of Black and Indigenous peoples on Block Island challenges historical erasure; their experiences can then become a meaningful part of the collec…

The histories of African Americans, Native Americans, and colonial populations during the United States’ national consolidation and imperial expansion after the Civil War have frequently been treated as distinct and separate experiences, a historiographic practice that minimizes…

History dictates legacy. History is a weapon! Racism has always been a pandemic of affliction with a hot spot in the Black community. The infestation transitioned from colonialism and imperialism to the establishment of Black enslavement, evolving into generations of social move…

Religious participation has been shown to affect in a positive way physical and mental health, while its absence indicates a negative correlation. Religious communities seek to increase participation for the benefit of the community, the participants, and society. This study foc…

This study was conducted using semistructured interviews to investigate the lived career-mobility experiences of six Black FBS head coaches, who had served in that position for at least one season from 2005–2020, through the lens of five tenets of critical race theory, which wer…

The Negro Spiritual has long been a style of choral music often enjoyed by various audiences yet is approached and interpreted incorrectly. The spiritual is often programmed at the end of a choral concert, and the interpretation lends itself to a "feel good" moment versus authen…

This work examines the lynching of twelve female victims in Texas from 1885 to 1926.

Flowers Grew Out of the Asphalt” addresses how the treatment of Black women in the afterlife of slavery, under the guise of whitening ideologies, contributed to the formations of regional identity and Black women’s geographies in the city of São Paulo. The lives and presence of …

While Northwest Arkansas is considered as diverse and progressive today, it also shares a common history of racial violence, and yet almost unknown, with the Southern United-States. Little is being said about the slave plantations in Elkins, racial cleansing in Springdale, or pu…

In “A Talk to Teachers” (1963), James Baldwin underscored the importance of critically examining how society functions and “trying to change it and to fight it.” Taking heed of Baldwin’s advice, in Bold Truths and Uncomfortable Insights, I theorize that both the fiction and nonf…

The sexual violence and terrorism inflicted upon enslaved Black women by white men was integral in shaping the character of Caribbean Atlantic slavery, as was the resistance to that violence. The ramifications of these encounters set and shaped social parameters of intimacy, sex…

This thesis is a hybrid public history project that includes a critical paper and a website. Both sections of the thesis analyze Black women’s literary work in the early twentieth century. The main historical actors discussed within the text are Elise Johnson McDougald, Jessie R…

In the early 1970s, Black leaders across the United States began to talk about the need for political activism and holding a meeting where people could gather to discuss ideas of change, moving from voicing anger and frustration during the 1960s and turning toward a new directio…

This dissertation examines the movement of enslaved people in the antebellum United States from the Upper South to the cotton frontier of the Deep South and the impact that forced relocation had on family formation over time. This move took an entire generation of slaves and art…

Mound Bayou, Mississippi is a small community founded by newly freed African-Americans in 1887. Historically known as an agricultural town, it thrived economically, educationally, and spiritually into the first decades of the 20th century while becoming a physical example of the…

Black women singers have often been lauded and emulated for their musical talents, but also have been regulated to the lower level of societal hierarchy in the music industry. They had to endure racialized and gendered power structures in the field that positioned white men at t…