Afro Brazilian and African American struggle poster exhibition

This blog ends the year 2012 with an announcement and an opportunity. Students taking “African Americans in the City” next spring at the University of Alabama will have a chance to work on a project centered around a group of posters found in Charles Town, West Virginia, which unveil the shared struggles of African Americans during the era generally known as the Civil Rights movement. Brazilian researcher Amilcar Pereira and UA's History professor Teresa Cribelli will coordinate. Using information learned in the course, the class will collectively write a curatorial statement. The project will culminate in an exhibition to be held April 28 at the University. Among the tasks will be exploring how “black” means one thing in the United States, but often something entirely else in the Caribbean and Latin America. For example, C.L.R. James' study of the Haitian revolution uncovers how elite people of mixed race were pitted against African slaves during the late eighteenth century in that country. Ula Taylor's exploration of the life of Amy Jacques Garvey, wife of the famous political leader, Marcus Garvey, learned upon her entry into Harlem in 1917 that meanings about "black" differed from those in her native Jamaica where people were generally known as "black," "brown" and "white." In her investigation of  how “blacks”became invisible in Colombia, Aline Helg reveals how the costenos, or people of color on la Costa or the Atlantic coast of Colombia, shied away from racially distinguishing themselves even though anthropologists have noted racial stereotyping of this group by others. Interestingly, Helg discovered that the lack of transportation and communication between the frontier, cities and towns compelled people, including the costenos, to focus more on their immediate environment, and not the “country” as a whole for identity purposes. Her findings are striking given that Colombia at the time of her 2004 study had the largest population of people of African descent in the “Western” world outside of the United States and Brazil. What allows some countries to create racial ideologies and prohibits others from fully doing the same? How do people of color in different countries still manage to come together to address their shared oppression? These are among the questions this course will try to answer. From time to time, students will write future blog entries here. Again, happy holidays and all best in the new year!

"i started my life in an old, cold, rundown tenement slum"

This blog has offered a preview of topics that might be useful in conversations involving African Americans' historical presence in cities. Behind every posting has been a desire to push thinking about when and why African Americans became associated with city living and how space is always part of the equation in such an exploration. There has also been a wish that we examine things we take for granted such as why few listeners questioned that Diana Ross and the Supremes’ late-1960s hit, “Love Child” (“I started my life in an old, cold, rundown tenement slum…”) was about a black child born out of wedlock in a northern city. Such conversations benefit greatly from also investigating how the literature on African American urban history has progressed from addressing race and ghettoes to debates about blacks as an “underclass.” Entangled in some of these discussions are many issues, among them, migration, gender, ethnicity, the significance of border cities, deindustrialization, class politics, suburban settlement and definitions of community. As I think through these and other topics, and continue other work, I send season’s greetings and wishes for a happy new year.

"who they out there?"

The story of African Americans in cities often begins outside of cities. John Boles' study of South Carolina reveals, among many things, people of African descent's ties to land including land in the South. “The South is the blacks’ land, too,” he writes, “and southerner is a biracial term." While presenting the unique features of the oppressive slave era, including slavery’s development in Africa, Boles also draws attention to the eighteenth century when “blacks learned to communicate with one another…began to create families and develop a sense of black community." But as this scene in Julie Dash's 1991 "Daughters of the Dust" depicts, some of the earliest families of African descent in the United States also understood the degree to which there was a world beyond the immediate land around them. This world was quite different from their distinctive culture. If it is true African Americans are composed of many ancestral parts, as the Gullah people in Dash's film reveal, how does culture persist when people move to new locales? How is it altered?

"across the street and down the next two blocks"

This is only my fifth blog entry and I have often referenced some development concerning African Americans in cities and how it reminds me of another. Though not entirely, Neil Levi’s thoughts about memory as it relates to comparisons especially those concerning the Holocaust resonate. He writes, “If you know stories about other nations, the story of one will inevitably remind you of the story of another. Stories of national singularity rarely sound as singular as those who tell would wish.” I want to now emphasize my own awareness of how  context and other issues are very important to how we understand that which seems “similar.” That said, I return again to the idea of how African American bodies in the United States have appeared beside non-African American bodies, and do so by focusing on residential arrangements in cities via two literary works:

“…I can remember the houses went White, White, White, Japanese, White, White. Across the street and down the next two blocks were about the same except there was more Japanese, two Chinese and a Philippines house on the corner by the woods. Down Crowley was where all the Negro houses started.”  – Lynda Barry, The Good Times are Killing Me

 “The house had been let go a bit. A white neighbor, Maureen Iris Vistin, who lived on the corner across the street, had come over several times to clean Mary’s room or bring her something hot to eat, or just fruit, juice, or soup. Mr. Lee at the grocery store gave her credit when she needed it. He knew he would be paid.” – J. California Cooper, Some People, Some Other Place

Which details permit us to possibly identify where these communities are located and when? Are the narrators telling a similar story? If so or not, why?