More titles for new graduate course

Here are some more books to which we will turn in the new graduate course "Gender, Race and the Urban Space." The students and I will read lots of thick excerpts this time around as I partly want to help them see the abundance of literature in the growing field of urban history, but also help them see the many ways of studying "city," "gender" and "race" as categories of analyses separately and collectively. 

Some of the titles are imagined works and others are historical monographs ranging from the colonial period to postwar America. 

We will even look for transnational correspondences between the ways in which certain bodies are policed. For example, while bodies marked "Other" on the basis of race, gender and sexuality are under surveillance in the United States during the rising Jim Crow period at the turn of the century, bodies some might deem similar are under surveillance in Ponce, an urban space in Puerto Rico at the same time, as Eileen Findlay Suarez' study of Ponce reveals. Above all, we will be greatly interested in how the urban space and particular bodies encounter one another.

As I have talked to prospective graduate students, I have been impressed by their wide-ranging interests. Some of them plan to delve into the issue of gender and the urban space during the Civil War, for example. I am encouraged by these early conversations. Along the way, I wonder how much of my interest in this subject was sparked by my delight in reading Lynda Barry's The Good Times are Killing Me in my early 20s. I first discovered this book in Books & Books, an independent book chain in my native South Florida. 

Some of my experiences as an elementary student at Biscayne Gardens Elementary in then-Miami-Dade county resonate against the narrative about an African American girl and white girl in late 1960s-early 1970s Seattle. At the time, I was one of several dozen African American students in then-northwest Dade County being bussed from our predominantly black community to then-predominantly white schools in North Miami.  A good many of my classmates were white. Some were Jewish, but many were of Cuban and Puerto Rican descent, too. I do not recall knowing anyone from any other Caribbean country, although before and after World War II my own relatives arrived to South Florida not only from Mississippi and Georgia, but the Bahamas. Indeed, I spent the first five years of my life in the Coconut Grove community of Miami.

As I have written earlier on this blog, I did not know that the kids from my neighborhood in the then-northwest Dade community of Carol City (now the city of Miami Gardens) were integrating these North Miami schools. I just remember the white students and teachers mostly being open to us being there. My first best friend who was not from my neighborhood wore the same Winnie the Pooh dresses I wore. She had blonde hair and blue-grey eyes. I can still see her waiting in front of the school for the yellow bus bringing the black children. I was one of those children.

As I got closer to our sixth grade graduation, and moving on to a middle school closer to my neighborhood, I heard and saw things that made me think of racial differences more.

Why then, I now wonder? The year was 1979. What was happening in America? What had earlier happened in America? What would happen next in America? I think now of the Marielito boat lifts, the Arthur McDuffie riots and the role that African American young men from poor communities played in the rise of the University of Miami football program, which all contributed in some way to a changed Miami-Dade County (although not always in ways some people hoped). The graduate students and I will explore these many subjects together. 

But first things first. Did someone say "Fall Break?'

Spring 2015 beckons

Tera Hunter's important study takes us to postbellum Atlanta.

This spring, I will be teaching black urban history for the first time as a graduate course.  It is titled "Gender, Race and the Urban Space."

I plan to rely greatly on excerpts from the growing literature on urbanization and African Americans in urban settings. This is partly because I really want the students to home in on "city" as a category of analysis while keeping other categories like gender and race front and center. 

I welcome the challenge.

This course is an outcome of my joint appointment in the University of Alabama's Gender and Race Studies Department.

Whether we read social, political, economic or cultural histories, the students will be pushed to see how the urban space functions alongside the experiences, attitudes, trials, triumphs, motivations of people of African descent. 

Over sixteen weeks, we will thoughtfully and rigorously see them in anticipated and unexpected narratives. To help me get myself going, I can't help but turn to one of my favorite soundscapes: Marvin Gaye's What's Going On/What's Happening Brother.

And just looking at the titles in my prelim summaries, I get excited about this rich literature again. With able minds beside me, I get to roll up my sleeves  and really pull apart an incredible body of scholarship and re-piece a critical narrative in the "American" story. 

This task is welcomed as I slowly pivot from studying the migratory experiences of African Americans in antebellum Cincinnati, which is my first research project, to 20th century Miami, my second one.

For now, I press on through the Fall semester (and watch the growing list of things to do for the Spring).

The Nineteenth Century City

 

Using a Photograph to Ponder Race and the Urban Space

Coming Fall 2014

Sarah Forbes Bonetta Davies, 19th century woman

Though I have not graded the first paper for this course, I am already prepping for next semester. In addition to teaching "U.S. to 1865" (HY 103), I will teach "The Nineteenth Century City" (HY 300) again. Students in this course will spend more time looking at urban life in America during the nineteenth century. The growth of cities begins in earnest in the early nineteenth century. By 1920, more Americans lived in cities than the countryside.

While making fliers for this course, I wanted to find one that has resonances with one of the course readings, a memoir by Eliza Potter, a hairdresser of mixed race. A native of New York, Potter traveled to Europe, working as a nursemaid and later as a hairdresser for wealthy people on both sides of the Atlantic. All this as she eventually  owned a home with her "own fig tree," as she put it, in Cincinnati. Potter's account is helpful to my effort to show students how race, gender and class can nuance what can be learned in any exploration of city life, something I hope students enrolled this spring in Black Urban Culture understand as they prepare for their final exam.

One of the fliers I made advertising "The Nineteenth Century City" features  Sarah Forbes Bonetta Davies, a woman of West African royal ancestry who was reportedly orphaned in 1848 when her parents were killed in a massacre. I was struck by Davies' elegant hairdo in this photograph. Two years later, the king of Dahomey presented her as a "gift" to Queen Victoria. After becoming the queen's goddaughter, Davies apparently spent the rest of her life between her home in England and Africa until her death in 1880.

Davies' life made me think of Potter even though Potter's memoir focuses primarily on her experiences of styling the hair of white Americans and Europeans. It made me wonder if she had in fact ever had the opportunity to style the hair of a person of African descent. Surely in her memoir, one case see the degree to which she emphasizes her desire to treat all people - black or white, rich or poor, enslaved or free - the same. 

"Love and Basketball" (2000)  has a funny reference to Spaudling's sporting goods empire.

Spaulding Collection, New York Public Library

In addition to learning about Potter, the students will also be introduced to various developments that help define city life including the arrival of department stores. They will learn as much via a text on nineteenth century urban culture in the United States. It was written by Gunther Barth. 

Baseball also helped define city life.  A.G. Spaulding, a native of Illinois, was one of the first Americans to make an enormous amount of money on sporting goods including equipment for baseball. 
By the 1880s, men who were confined to New York and Pittsburgh factories and offices, headed to ball parks. Whereas football was initially associated with the wealthy and educated, baseball early on made room for working class urban dwellers. But by the time it got professionalized in the late nineteenth century, the ball clubs - not the players - increasingly had the most power and this was true for decades.

This sport, like many, was segregated well into the twentieth century, oppressing certain players even more. As Barth tells us, not only needed something to divert their attention from their depressing environs, but something that mirrored their own struggle for success. Writes Barth, "the game almost reduced their daily tensions because its ups and downs seemed more momentous than their own lives."

miami: another postwar case study

I attended the UM when we won our 2nd  championship.

Mohl builds on Arnold Hirsch's study.

I am looking forward to next week's class and not because it is the last class of the semester. I will really miss the students, some of whom are graduating seniors. I am also looking forward to talking to them about black urban culture as it relates to Miami, my hometown. As mentioned earlier on this blog, my next research project involves an exploration of race and space in Miami across time.  At some point along the way, I will be attentive to the impact of the University of Miami's football program on race relations in South Florida. Whenever I say as much, many people mention ESPN's 30 for 30 documentary on the University of Miami, which certainly addresses this issue in passing. 

Miami in 1919, Perry Castaneda Collection, UT-Austin

The students will not only see this outstanding documentary next week, but will also read an excerpt from University of Alabama at Birmingham's Raymond Mohl and Mark Rose's study on interstate highway politics in South Florida. They will also read a Mohl essay on how Arnold Hirsch's second ghetto thesis relates to postwar housing patterns in Miami (Teresa Van Dyke, a librarian in Special Collections at Florida Atlantic University and one of Mohl's MA students, has also used Miami as a site to explore the second ghetto thesis).

As also earlier mentioned, my family's own migratory patterns in Miami-Dade County certainly demonstrate the belief by Mohl and others that the movement and relocation of African Americans from segregated housing, or "ghettoes," to other areas that eventually became segregated, or "second ghettoes," was a result of many factors including racial hostility via public policy and realtor practice. 

What new things can we learn about the postwar housing experiences of African Americans in urban areas? How can our new understandings of the ways in which "blackness" is understood differently in a county like Miami where people often come from Latin and Caribbean communities push our thinking on this issue? 

The map pictured here depicts Miami before the Second World War, shortly after some of my paternal ancestors relocated to Miami from the Bahamas. Other ancestors would arrive from Georgia and after the war, from Mississippi. 

Just seeing the words "Atlantic Ocean" on the map makes me long for the smell of salt in the air. My family originally lived in the Coconut Grove section of Miami before relocating to then-Carol City, which is in the "second ghetto" about which Mohl writes (neither are pictured on the map). To us, it was wonderful step up as this neighborhood was mostly middle class and filled with three and four bedroom houses. Carol City is now in the City of Miami Gardens. You can always tell how long someone has lived in South Florida. If they call Miami-Dade simply "Dade County" or Carol City simply "Carol City," they have been there for a while.

"to them we are more cookie cut than Pillsbury"

Adiche was born in Nigeria.

Yesterday we completed our spoken word presentations. Excerpts from the students' reading are posted in the YouTube clip above. While recording, I accidentally covered up the mic so I had to do a voice-over while editing. 

Cole recasted Stevie Wonder's "Living for the City." Iesha recasted Will Smith's "Welcome to Miami." And Dachelle recasted B.B. King's "Sweet Sixteen Blues." Dachelle's presentation was a timely performance because we just finished the second third of B.B. King's memoir. Indeed, we had a lively discussion after I encouraged the students to try and insert King, a Second World War vet and musician, into the postwar narrative that Thomas Sugrue describes in his study on the origins of the urban crisis in Detroit and other Rust Belt cities. While some students believed King's biography was a coded appeal to the mainstream, others did not totally buy it. Few can argue that his initial move from his home in the Mississippi Delta to nearby Memphis does figure into the ways in which many southern blacks left rural communities for cities even though his experiences did not entirely parallel to African Americans who were harmed by a deindustralizing postwar America. As Sugrue writes, when whites, jobs and businesses left urban spaces between the 1950s and 1960s,  capitalism posed special burdens for many people of color who were left behind.

King's thoughts about life in America proved interesting. For example, he says he does not believe fellow Mississippian Elvis Presley stole anything from African American musicians. Notably, King also performed at benefits for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King.


Next week, we will finish B.B. King's autobiography while also turning to the different ways that "blackness" has been understood in the United States and other places across time. To get this conversation going, we will read an excerpt from Aline Helg's study on black Colombians, watch an excerpt from Melvin Van Peeble's 1968 "A Story of Three Day Pass," view an excerpt from the 1959 film "Black Orpheus" and read an excerpt from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's well-received Americanah.

"i am somebody ... in detroit"

Diana Ross and the Supremes were a Detroit-based group.

This past Wednesday, Robyn, Brandy and Alex presented their spoken word adaptations of popular songs invoking images of people of color in urban spaces. Robyn recasted Gladys Knight and the Pips' "Mr. Welfare," a song from the 1974 movie Claudine; Brandy recasted Diana Ross and the Supremes' 1967 hit "Love Child" and Alex recasted Stevie Wonder's 1974 hit "Living for the City" (though I had to read his words as he'd lost his voice).

What these songs have in common: they allow us to see some of the trials of black life after the Second World War. This is an issue we will closely study  next week after reading an excerpt from Thomas Sugrue's The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Sugrue essentially argues that the period from the 1940s through the 1960s sets the stage for the many-layered racial crises all-too apparent in today's cities. In saying this, he is pointing to a particular window in which we see how capitalism produces inequality and how African Americans disproportionately figure into such inequality. As Sugrue has written, the joblessness, desolate landscape, and racist housing patterns in Detroit since the war can be found in other Rust Belt cities, or urban spaces from the northeast to the Midwest that were once the industrial "backbone" of this country.

 While reading Sugrue, we will consider some of the candid words offered in the 1973 documentary Wattstax, which we watched this past Wednesday. I was pleased to see the students' response to this historical music festival in the Watts section of Los Angeles. This so-called "black Woodstock" opened the door for us to learn more about why Watts went up in flames in 1965. I was particularly intrigued by how this one movie creates opportunities for conversations about black on black crime, black love, and black pride.

Hip hop performer/actor Ice Cube has sampled B.B. King's music.

On Wednesday, we also discussed the first third of B.B. King's memoir, which provided a chance for us to see how King, an African American man from a rural area, pushes our thinking about black life before the postwar era. King was born in poverty in the Mississippi Delta in the early 20th century. He would eventually relocate to Memphis where he slowly made a name for himself as a dee jay and a musician (By the way, the Wattstax festival was organized by the Memphis-based Stax Records whose roster included the Staple Singers and Isaac Hayes). Though he would go on to make considerable money as a blues musician, King was not unacquainted with racism. While serving a term in the U.S. Army during the Second World War, he saw how German prisoners of war were given better treatment than black American soldiers by white Americans.  King was still able to see that "not all whites" were behind the lynchings of which he was aware in the South. 

That said, speaking of King, Wattstax and Cube, we will also want to remember that black migration during the 20th century was not only to the north, but to the Far West where African Americans did not experience the full promise of postwar wealth - especially in the defense industry. This reality sits uneasily against that portrayed on the late-1960s/early-1970s television series Julia, which finds Diahann Carroll (who starred in Claudine) playing a single widowed mother who works as a nurse in the California aerospace industry.  The show has  across time had a mixed response for a variety of reasons including the belief by some that the show's producers attempted to erase race from Julia's experiences.

Diahann Carroll also stars in the 1974 film Claudine.

As we move on to the second third of King's book, it is worth it for us to think about this as we consider the "underclass" thesis we earlier discussed. Another challenge before us: revisiting our interest in how the postwar growth and movement of the black upper and middle class seems to have resulted in a black  underclass. Can we observe King's life against the picture that Sugrue offers? Is King part of this postwar urban crisis narrative that Sugrue describes? How does he circumvent or find himself in this story of racial urban oppression? Certainly his music resonates with many artists who have focused on black urban life, among them Ice Cube who sampled King's  "Chains and Things" for his rap song "Bird in Hand." I hope my mention of Cube's sample on Wednesday helped the students reflect more on our earlier attention to Robin Kelley's Race Rebels: Culture, Politics and the Black Working Class. King said he turned to his guitar to cope with pain. Some hip hop performers appear to have done something similar.

That said, how does the narrative of  postwar urban life change (or stay the same) with the specific experiences of black women front and center as seen in Julia, scenes from Wattstax, and various songs and readings in mind -  high among the latter, the Daniel Monynihan 1965 report on the black family via the excerpt from the Joe Trotter, Earl Lewis and Tera Hunter edited collection?

from memphis to watts...black music and black struggle

Yesterday Taleisha recasted "Da Butt," a 1988 tune from E.U., a Washington DC-based go-go band, as a spoken word presentation. The song, like many songs across time, among them "Dancing in the Streets" and "Chocolate City," mentions the names of several U.S. cities, especially ones in which African Americans increasingly lived during the 20th century. Before her presentation, the students discussed the historiography on black urban life from W.E.B. Dubois' late nineteenth century study on Philadelphia and the Chicago school's look at African American life in Chicago to William Julius Wilson's "underclass" thesis. They generally understood that scholars have across time paid attention to race, ghettoes and class while trying to understand the particular trials and triumphs of African Americans in urban spaces.

Indianola, MS-born B.B. King

After Spring Break, we will look more closely at the postwar era as it relates to black life in the U.S. by reading - of all things - B.B. King's autobiography. This book, which was co-written by David Ritz, unveils how King's move from the Mississippi Delta to nearby Memphis, positioned him to expand his employment opportunities beyond rural work. In this way, he joins many African Americans who did something similar. As true of other blacks, King initially did not experience the promise of America's economic boom on the heels of the Second World War. But he eventually went on to become a famous guitarist and singer. His life's story offers us a chance to think deeply about the work of many scholars who drew various conclusions about black life including ones concerning the role of women and men in the black family.

We will take up these issues and more while also thinking about how the black freedom struggles during the 1940s through the early 1970s manifest musically. Wattstax, a  1973 documentary about the seeming black version of Woodstock, opens the door for that discussion. The movie focuses on a concert that took place in 1972 in the Watts section of Los Angeles.

Connections have been made between the high unemployment rates of African Americans and the race rebellion  that took place in Watts 1965. The concert was organized by Stax Records, a Memphis company known for its production of soul music beginning in the 1960s. Between interviews with many noted figures discussing black life in the America, the film presents performances by several artists including the Staple Singers, Isaac Hayes, Rufus Thomas and the BarKays.

dancing in funky streets...can you dig it

 
Today three more students did their spoken word presentations. Ann Marie recasted Martha and the Vandella's "Dancing in the Street" (She did as much with inspiration from Marvin Gaye's 1971 hit "What's Going On" because Gaye helped pen the Vandella's hit. I didn't know this. I am big fan of the album on which this song appears. As I told the students, it was the first album I listened to from beginning to end with tears in my eyes). Katarina Thompson recasted Wilson Pickett's 1967 hit "Funky Broadway" and  Trakayla recasted Parliament's 1975 hit "Chocolate City" (which is an alternately revolutionary and humorous nod to Washington D.C.) All this as we moved beyond discussing themes often associated with black urban life in America, among them resistance, identity, labor and housing.

We will now turn to how how scholars have historically written about African American life in the urban space. While W.E.B. Dubois certainly christened this subfield of African American history with his late nineteenth century study on the Philadelphia Negro, the students learned that in the opening decades of the twentieth century Chicago was the site to which many scholars often turned  to better understand black life in urban spaces. Stay tuned for excerpts from the students' reflections on what we discussed in class today.  Chicago figured greatly into our conversation.

Meanwhile, I look forward to next week's class and hearing their thoughts on two writings that have helped shaped black urban literature: St. Clair Drake and Horace Clayton's 1945 study Black Metropolis, which is indeed centered on Chicago, and Gilbert Osofsky's 1968 study which presents Harlem as an "enduring ghetto." The class will  do well to prepare by first starting with the introductory pages to a recently published edited collection of essays on black urban life by Joe W. Trotter with Earl Lewis and Tera Hunter.

an empire state....that thing

Cooper's novel unveils complexities of urban space

Kerry Washington stars as Olivia Pope

Today Callie and Dushane presented their spoken word presentations. Dushane recast "Empire State of Mind" by Jay-Z featuring Alicia Keys and Callie recast Lauryn Hill's "Doo Wop (That Thing)." Again, another set of impressive performances. The students are truly understanding the complexities of urban life when race is part of the equation. 

In today's discussion, we also took up the issue of class and gender by looking at black female laundry workers in postbellum Atlanta as presented in a monograph by historian Tera Hunter. We juxtaposed those women's experiences against the migrating working class women of color under surveillance in northern cities during the interwar period as presented by historian Hazel Carby. 

In an effort to help the students see the degree  to which African American women in both narratives had "self-determined" spirits no matter the level of their oppression, I encouraged them to turn to Olivia Pope, a character in a modern day television drama's "Scandal" (I did as much because I earlier saw some of them enthusiastic about this show). A lively conversation ensued, so much so Callie set up a Group Me app and we will all watch tomorrow's episode separately and continue talking about the specific experiences of African American women who, as Carby explains, created a "moral panic" for both whites and the black elite after migrating north. Jake noted how the iconic "Miss Anne," or white women who spent time in Harlem among African American artists and musicians, created panic, too. It will be interesting to see what new things we will learn about such panic and about the urban space via Pope. 

We will  continue discussing such issues next week while turning to an excerpt from J. California Cooper's Some People, Some Other Place, an imagined work unveiling a woman who could easily be one of the women Carby is describing. Eula Too has recently arrived in a Chicago suburban home as a new migrant from the South. She finds an unlikely friend and employer. We will also turn to Reynolds Farley's essay on the urbanization of "the Negro" in the United States as another avenue to continue thinking about how urban life was increasingly defined by the black body. We will also read Allan Spear's essay on how white racism affected residential patterns in 20th century Chicago. Farley and Spear's writings will set the stage for how we, among other things, consider the "tone" of historical scholarship on black urban life and how it came to be that Chicago is often front and center when we look at academic work on African American "urban" experiences.

on taking long walks on the "A" train

Here are excerpts from two students reading from their spoken word presentations after class this week. Elizabeth recast Duke Ellington's "Take the A Train" and Apryl recast Jill Scott's "A Long Walk." The ways in which both students  made their presentations personal and historical was quite impressive. 

Notably, Apryl used the University of Alabama as a political landscape to take a long walk. Among places she rhetorically visited was the "schoolhouse" door on Foster auditorium where Governor George Wallace stood in 1963 in an attempt to delay the segregation of the university.

Elizabeth was more drawn  to the difficulties of urban living as seen in the  dilapidated buildings often inhabited by African Americans in cities, and to the specific challenges that black girls and women face in a modern world anywhere. She used the "A" train -  which, as the song tells us,  goes to Harlem - as a metaphor for a new kind of journey that African American women and girls could take that would allow them to harness their stronger selves anywhere. As an aside, I was very proud to sit this week beside Elizabeth on a Black Feminism panel, which was sponsored by the Women's Resources Center here at the university. 

Jake and Shayla, two more students, also presented. Jake did a wonderful job recasting the 1950s rhythm and blues song "Kansas City" and Shayla recast Janelle Monae's recent hit "Q.U.E.E.N."

Tera Hunter's book on black female labor.

On another note, the class took up the issue of mobility again as it relates to life in and outside the urban space by discussing the upheaval that white and black Americans experienced during the Civil War as relayed in Yael Sternhell's Routes of War: The World of Movement in the Confederate South. We juxtaposed that book against an excerpt from Dolen Perkins-Valdez' Wench  that unveils the first time a group of four enslaved women enter the city of Dayton without the oversight of their white masters. Both readings put the idea of "transitions" squarely before us, something we will want to continue thinking about when we turn to an excerpt from Tera Hunter's To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors after the Civil War and Hazel Carby's look at how black women's bodies were under surveillance in urban spaces at the turn of the century. As we read, we will want to keep in mind how time figures into black mobility. We will want to wonder about the things that black bodies could and could not do before and after the Civil War. We should also wonder how gender pushes our thinking on this matter. With Carby in mind, we should also be very attentive to whether or not there is a monolithic black female experience, or whether there are differences, as Wench seems to suggest, in how some black women experience oppression. Finally, we should also be thinking about how geography figures into everything before us. For example, what makes the efforts of black laundry workers in Atlanta extremely significant for the "South"? I look forward to a hearty discussion on these and other issues
next week.

"She made up her mind while standing on the street of Dayton."

Dolen Perkins-Valdez, author of Wench.

I returned the students' midterms yesterday and was happy to see how well some of them engaged ideas like "identity" and "resistance" in their short writings (they had a choice between writing a poem or an essay in addition to answering multiple choice questions). The issue of identity certainly figured into our look at the ways in which "blackness" is appropriated via music  as seen in the movie The Commitments. This motion picture concerns a group of Dubliners who form a band that plays hits made famous by African American artists during the 1950s and 1960s. After the movie, we saw the beginnings of a heated discussion on whether we are persuaded that the Irish, as the movie suggests, are the "blacks" of Europe. 

One of the more provocative observations came from a student who commented that Mexicans seem to be the "blacks" of Latin America. That comment and others stated in class or via written reflections that I read later pushed my own thinking about race as a social construction. Moreover, like some of the students who indicated as much via their written reflections, I remain quite interested in how the urban space expands the possibilities of understanding how race appears (and disappears) whenever other issues like ethnicity, poverty and labor are before us. 

To be clear, Dublin is very much a city and while watching the movie yesterday, the grime and poverty we tend to see in America's inner cities, which are heavily-populated by people of African descent, it was hard to not see what message Alan Parker, the filmmaker was trying to send. Whether we are persuaded by his story or not, it was a good discussion that sets us up to return to the idea of race and space next week. We will look at excerpts from Yael Sternhell's study of how southern people - black and white, enslaved and not - were forced to make sense of the world around them simply because they had to move through space amid the upheaval surrounding the Civil War. Their experiences pose unique tensions with an excerpt from Wench, a work of fiction by Dolen Perkins-Valdez. In an excerpt from that novel, we will learn about four enslaved women who traveled to a city away from the direct oversight of their masters. How does the urban space inform their impressions of their oppression? How does the opportunity to simply be mobile make them aware of the possibility of freedom? We will try to think about possible answers to these questions while keeping race and gender squarely before us.

"say it loud. i'm black and i'm proud!"

still image from The Commitments (1991)

I am still grading the students' mid-terms exams while writing new lectures for my US Since 1865 survey so, I am behind on keeping up this blog. I especially wanted to share more of the students' ideas about identity. We will certainly return to this issue this week by completing Lynda Barry's book The Good Times Are Killing Me and watching one of my favorite films of all time, "The Commitments." This 1991 motion picture, which is set in Dublin, presents an Irish band that has an incredible love for African American music - especially tunes from the 1950s and 1960s. At one point,  they declare, "Say it loud. I'm black and I'm proud" a la James Brown. 

I first fell in love with this film by accident. I was still working as a journalist and stumbled upon a promotional poster for this movie in a newspaper library. It was a freebie. I took it home. I loved the many black and white images and decided to look for the film on VHS. 

Years later, I recall watching the film with new eyes as I learned more about how race is socially constructed. Indeed, upon hearing that today some Irish people do not like African immigrants in their country, fearing as did some antebellum Irish in the United States , that they will take away much needed resources, I wondered how I could still love the film. I was reminded of the lyrics in one Sounds of Blackness tune that go, "Everybody wants to sing my blues, but nobody wants to live my blues." I am still working through this inner conflict and lean more toward seeing the complexities in people and being very curious about how to find meaning in it all.

My students and I will take up the issue of identity again by looking again at music. American singer Miley Cyrus' "performance" of "blackness" certainly prompted lively conversation not just in class, but in at least one poem that a student turned in for her mid-term. Yes, in addition to 30 multiple choice questions, the students had a choice of exploring identity, resistance, housing and labor across time via a short essay question or a poem. I was stunned by the creativity seen in those who decided to address these themes via poetry.

I am reminded again of the value in exploring the alternatives to writing essays. Instructors often see students with different skill sets and it is worth it to allow those who "get" the material to find new ways of showing as much. Three colleagues here at Alabama and I recently proposed a panel talk for an upcoming conference on this subject. To be continued....

bringing together key themes

Taleisha's drawing on identity

Still from "Claudine"

still from "Django Unchained"

Yesterday, the students in this class were pushed to think about four key themes addressed so far in this course in preparation for next week's mid-term: identity, resistance, labor and housing. The idea is to get them to think about how these concepts relate to African American life across time.

Inspired by Lynda Barry's work, I began by asking them to write or draw images related to the idea of "identity." Taleisha's drawing, which takes into account how you see yourself and how others see you, is posted above. 

The 1974 movie "Claudine," which presents the story of a mother on welfare, further pushed our thinking. I love that  movie and enjoyed hearing the students laugh. Diahann Carroll should have won an Oscar for it. We also discussed the readings including Barry's picture book on a friendship between a white girl and black girl in the United States some time in the late 1960s or early 1970s. Their experiences in a segregated city were juxtaposed against that of blacks and Germans in antebellum Buffalo as presented by historians James Horton and Hartmut Keil. I told them that although Quentin Tarantino's 2012 "Django Unchained" is not without problems, Tarantino nailed it when he allowed us to see an enslaved black woman speaking German before the  Civil War. As Horton and Keil reveal, blacks and Germans often lived beside each other peacefully during the antebellum period. There are reasons why their interactions were quite different from those African Americans had with other Europeans, namely the Irish. Among the reasons is how Irish immigrants often arrived in the States poor unlike the Germans who were fleeing a failed revolution.

I look forward to seeing how the students find meaning in all of these ideas when they take the midterm next week. Stay tuned for more of their initial thoughts on identity.

"...I can remember when the houses White, White, White, Japanese, White, White...."

Self portrait of artist Lynda Barry

The snow has melted. While it was here, we had lots of time to catch up on our reading since the University was closed for two days. I really look forward to seeing how the students in this class thought through the Robin Kelley Race Rebels reading (by the way, Kelley will be on our campus 7 pm Thursday in Gorgas Library 205 in conjunction with an exhibit on the Scottsboro boys). 

Kelley draws our attention to  black working class labor issues in postwar Los Angeles. We will pivot from him to Lynda Barry's wonderful picture book The Good Times Are Killing Me, which is also set after World War II in an unnamed city (feels like it is also the West Coast). As mentioned earlier in this blog, one of my favorite parts of the book finds Edna Arkins, a young pre-adolescent girl and protagonist, saying: "...I can remember when the houses White, White, White, Japanese, White, White....Then it seemed like just about everybody kept moving out until now our street is Chinese, Negro, Negro, White, Japanese, Filipino and about the same but in different orders for down the whole street and across the alley." I fell in the love with this book after buying it in a university bookstore when I was an undergrad at the University of Miami many years ago. 

I selected Barry's book for this coming week because it allows us to think about another issue that has been important to African Americans across time: housing. As I told the students, for many years whites and blacks lived beside each other and sometimes in a peaceful manner as James Horton and Hartmut Keil's look at pre-Civil War Buffalo, New York, our second reading for this coming week, demonstrates. 

19th century Buffalo, Perry-Casteneda Map Collection

What permitted blacks and German Americans in the particular to live peacefully beside each other before the Civil War? What makes it more difficult for blacks and whites to sometimes live together by the time we get to the late 1960s-early 1970s world Barry paints in her book? Moreover, how can we tie housing issues together with ones concerning labor, resistance and identity, the three themes in earlier readings? 

No matter how we do it, we will want to do it fearlessly as our midterm exam is Feb. 12. One of the five questions the students may pick from for their short essay on this first exam allows them to write a poem. Seeing as Barry as allows her students to draw in class, I think she would approve. Check it out.