Thesiss

Within the confines of slavery, nearly every aspect of an individual is controlled: their movement, their speech, their appearance. Expressing elements of identity through material culture was one form of rebellion practiced by enslaved people in the Americas, as messages of per…

AmeriCorps, a voluntary public service program founded in 1993, has largely consisted of a nonminority middle-class group, generally 20 to 29 years old, who had the financial assistance of family while serving. African American participants may be experiencing AmeriCorps-based p…

The media has played a critical role in reproducing anti-Black violence in the United States, which has often harmed African American communities. Historically, the white press has depicted graphic imagery and descriptions of Black people being brutalized, with little ethical re…

The purpose of this study was to understand the perceptions of African American adults 50 years and older about their risk or susceptibility to HIV infection, in the context of what they knew prior to developing HIV infection. African Americans, especially older adults, are incr…

The focus of this thesis is to examine Alice Walker's novel Possessing the Secret of Joy within the constructs of an established African American literary genealogy. Walker is interested in the inter-connectedness of the universe and the ways in which her ancestors--familial and…

This dissertation analyzes the implementation of civil rights reforms in public schools between 1965 and 1980 in three small Midwestern cities: Waterloo, Iowa; Benton Harbor, Michigan; and Cairo, Illinois. Schools were consistently a target and site of protest during these years…

The purpose of this thesis was to investigate the challenges encountered by Nigerian immigrant youth in the Metro-Toronto school system. The literature review shows scarcity of related work, and so much of this study relied on the general information on racial minority immigrant…

For the first time in critical theory, the Black subject can see itself whole. It can now tell its story from the emergence of the first humans in Africa to the present, as a relatively unbroken continuum. The epistemological conditions for the emergence of a new Black subjectiv…

This dissertation examines the internal operations, recruitment and mobilization patterns, and programmatic activities of the Black Student Leadership Network (BSLN), a national, student/youth social movement organization that operated between 1991–1996. This research relies upo…

Despite advances in tuberculosis treatment and prevention by the twentieth century, African Americans in Texas died from the disease at a rate three times that of whites. That trend continues today. This dissertation is the first study of the effort to control tuberculosis in th…

The aim of this work is to study the dynamics of mass media and individual identity by outlining the patterns of interaction between hip-hop culture (as it is packaged in the mass media) and Black women (as a socio-historical and cultural position). The project asks the followin…

African immigrants are the fastest growing immigrant population in New York but receive little attention in terms of health care programs. Through a mailed questionnaire to Nigerian Pastors in New York City, this study identified the Pastors' perceptions of the major health conc…

In the mid-nineteenth-century United States and Europe the idea arose that "race" is a matter of biology, internal "essence," a thing having real existence and permanence. Fifty years earlier, the Enlightenment had seen race as an ephemeral function of climate, geography, and mo…

Jazz Mecca is an auto-ethnographic study of the evolution of Chicago's South Side Jazz community with particular attention paid to the founding and development of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). Through interviews with Milt Hinton, Von Freeman, …

This study analyzes from an Afrocentric perspective, the main characteristics of the African epic hero and pinponts their close connection with the Kemetic mythological tradition, Kemet being the classical reference. The basic argument underlying this study is that the Kemetic t…

The genetics of obesity has been studied extensively in white populations, but very few studies have involved black populations. The genetic inheritance of obesity was examined in two samples of families of African origin. We used segregation analysis to study the transmission o…

This case study examines social, linguistic, and pedagogical factors that can significantly affect foreign language study among African American students. The researcher, as a participant observer, spent six months at an inner-city middle school teaching Arabic to 8 African Amer…

Scholars have had many discussions on the question whether the enslaved Africans retained any of their culture when they were brought to the United States. The question for deliberation is, did they remember their common thoughts, feelings, and actions regarding themselves, thei…

A number of books and articles have explored aspects of the pan-African ties between Ethiopia and the black diaspora. Although a much commendable and long overdue contribution, the works focus almost exclusively on the Italo-Ethiopian war period, and, even then, remain North Ame…

African Americans are the descendants of dispersed Africans who were enslaved in the British colonies and United States. Although the enslaved peoples were legally freed in the 1860s, subsequent generations continued to face racism and social alienation a century later. The desc…