Jim Crow Segregation

#AnneMoody

This is an overview of the Anne Moody History Project (AMHP) and its plans to promote and help preserve the legacy of Anne Moody (1940 - 2015). Ms. Moody was a civil rights pioneer and the famous author of Coming of Age in Mississippi. She grew up in Centreville, Miss., where she overcame poverty, racism, persecution, and the threats of death. She became a respected leader in the Civil Rights Movement.

Drawing on the author's background in marketing and journalism, this document presents a list of practical ideas adapted by AMHP for promoting Ms. Moody's history. The ideas include promotional work through schools, churches, the local community, government agencies, social media, and the news media. In addition to honoring her with a street and highway bearing her name, AMHP plans call for having a proclamation issued for “Anne Moody Day.” The author, who serves as AMHP chairman, has said the promotional campaign is about “history, education and tourism.” Current and future generations need to know her story, according to the author.

Note: Readers are encouraged to follow updates on Ms. Moody’s history by following @AnneMoodyHP on Twitter. #AnneMoody

“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” —William Butler Yeats (1889)

Welcome to our course, “Race and Ethnicity”!  These are not, needless to say, normal circumstances. This is the first time in four decades of teaching that I am doing so “online.”  It may be a new experience for you as well.  There are bound to be glitches (not to mention Murphy’s Law) as we adapt to the new conditions and challenges... but I have no doubt that we will overcome them together.  Our course, which begins on March 31, 2020, is being held in the context of the historic crisis we are all engulfed in, a once-in-a-century global pandemic that is not only bordering on a public health apocalypse but shaking all aspects of our lives and of our worlds (interpersonal, educational, occupational, financial, economic, political, residential, medical, social, cultural, psychological, familial)—requiring adaptations to rapidly changing and unpredictable circumstances.  (Like this online course, for instance!)  It is precisely in such moments of crisis—which shake our taken for granted notions and routines to their foundation, revealing the artifices of our social constructions of “reality” (including what we construct as “race” and “ethnicity”)—that a sociological imagination flourishes.  A folk saying has it that “when life gives you lemons, make lemonade.”  I look forward to making sociological lemonade with you this quarter.  The pandemic will not hit everyone alike, but will be patterned along hard lines of social and economic inequality and disadvantage—including race and ethnicity and immigration status.  Not everyone can “stay at home.”  Harsh realities are being exposed anew by this public health catastrophe... including the fact that SYSTEMIC RACISM IS A PUBLIC HEALTH ISSUE... along with possibilities to reshape the structure of our societies in the calamitous aftermath. (But as Frederick Douglass famously said long ago: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”)

We will read 1 book during our 11-week course: Race in America, by Matthew Desmond and Mustafa Emirbayer.
This is one of the very best textbooks on the subject that I have seen. The book is made up of 11 chapters, each about 40 pages (including many images, maps and graphics); you’ll be reading a chapter a week on average. 
The first 2 chapters spell out key concepts and address the historical invention and institutionalization of “race.” The next 8 core chapters (#3-10) focus on separate (but interconnected) fields of social life: political, economic, residential, legal, educational, aesthetic, associational, and intimate spheres (family, self, identity).  The last one, chapter 11, looks to the future: “Toward Racial Democracy.” In addition to the text, you will read a few supplementary readings, listed in the syllabus and course agenda.  In tandem with the course readings, over the next ten weeks I will regularly email you selected articles, reports, and analyses seeking to connect what you are studying to the breaking news of the day; while we cannot know now what may come in the coming months, we can be pretty certain that the issues addressed by our course will be at the heart of the historic crisis (or crises) that will engulf us.  By the end of the class you will have effectively a “curated” set of such accompanying relevant readings.

Tuesday March 31 is the start of our class.  Saturday April 4 marks the anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.  As I do every year at that time, as well as on the anniversary of his birth on January 15, I send my students an annual message of remembrance.  Please take time to read and reflect on it.

The goal of this class is to broaden your intellectual horizons; to study stress, not to cause it; to invite you to a memorable sociological adventure amid a global crisis that you and I will still be talking about many years from now.  And remember: Our course will end in June, but not our role and responsibility as members of the polis, as citizens as well as sociologists confronted by historic crises.  The critically informed citizen—whose voice is heard, who acts and votes and remains civically engaged—is racism’s worst enemy.  Becoming a critically informed citizen, ending racial domination and making a more just world is a lifetime commitment that never ends.  Silence is not an option at this (potential) turning point in the history of American democracy and racial justice, even amid a once-in-a-century pandemic.  Know that history.  Voice that history.  Read-think-write... and act.

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere... Justice too long delayed is justice denied." —Martin Luther King, Jr.,  Letter from Birmingham Jail (1963)

Race has played a disturbing role in the death penalty’s application throughout its history in the United States. During slavery, discrimination was explicitly written in many states’ laws, with a number of capital offenses reserved solely for black slaves. Racial bias continued during the Jim Crow era, in which black defendants often received little due process, as trials and executions sometimes both took place in a single day. Today, the race of the victim has a significant impact on who gets the death penalty, with the implication that black lives matter less.

Christopher Buck, “Plessy v. Ferguson.” Encyclopedia of African American History. Edited by Leslie Alexander & Walter Rucker. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2010. Pp. 959–963 (Vol. 3).

ABSRACT

In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), W. E. B. Du Bois wrote that the principle problem of the 20th century will be that of the color line. Being black was “strange” largely because of the estrangement between the races in America. The “color line” was drawn in bold by Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896). By keeping the Jim Crow status quo, Plessy deepened the racial divide. This is the notorious “separate but equal” case. Although not part of the decision verbatim, these three words, which accurately express the legal fiction of the Supreme Court’s ruling, gave legal sanction to Jim Crow segregation. Thus “separate but equal” equals “Jim Crow affirmed.”

This opinion is couched in legal language that requires an understanding of constitutional law to decode. The high court held that the separation of the races within states does not violate the Fourteenth Amendment, which had previously granted African Americans equal protection under the laws. The technical terms notwithstanding, the Court’s purport was patent. In black and white, Justice Henry Billings Brown kept blacks from whites. This bad result was “good law” for nearly six decades. It would take Brown v. the Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) to overrule Justice Brown. If, except for the Dred Scott case, Plessy was the worst Supreme Court ruling ever handed down, as Justice Harlan indicated in his dissent, then the Brown decision may rank as the greatest Supreme Court decision. To appreciate the greatness of Brown v. Board of Education, it is necessary to understand Plessy first.

Democracy is a process of progressive equalizing. It is a matter of degree. Mollified by democratic language and reasoning, nevertheless Plessy is a harsh and fundamentally undemocratic decision. More than undemocratic, it was antidemocratic because Plessy may be characterized as an antidemocratic reaction to the then-recent democratic reforms of Reconstruction (1865–1877).

Reconstruction was the nation’s first experiment in economic emancipation and interracial democracy. The three Reconstruction Amendments (the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments (1865, 1868, and 1870, respectively) established (legally but not factually) civil rights for all Americans. But the experiment failed; or rather, America failed the experiment. The reforms in- troduced by Reconstruction were being systematically dismantled in the South. For instance, the promise of “forty acres and a mule” was proclaimed by General William T. Sherman but never delivered by Congress. Reconstruction was progressive; Plessy was regressive. Plessy, in fact, was the ultimate deconstruction of Reconstruction—the final judicial nail in its historical coffin. Far worse were its social and historical consequences, for the decision legitimized legal segregation. Plessy was a pact with the devil of Jim Crow, and it legitimatized the American apartheid of systemic segregation.

Plessy’s “separate but equal” doctrine was an oxymoron. Yet, as the supreme law of the law, it held sway for well over a half-century. It would take the Brown decision to successfully overturn it. Brown v. Board of Edu- cation exposed the Plessy decision as a contradiction, ruling that “separate but equal” is inherently unequal.

The safety bicycle arrived in the U.S. South at the beginning of a transition from relative African American freedom following the Civil War to a reassertion of white hegemony. This article examines how southerners interpreted the meanings and practices of the safety bicycle through a contingent spatial and mobility politics found at the intersection of race and technology. For African Americans, the bicycle was both a symbolic and real opportunity to express modern freedoms at the moment those freedoms were being curtailed. Black cyclists whether they used the bicycle for leisure or utilitarian purposes contested the meanings and limits of mobility in the early Jim Crow period. The South, however, was not the only region of the world where the politics of race shaped bicycle mobilities and this article points to the ways the African American experience of bicycle technology mirrors but does not necessarily replicate places beyond the United States. Ultimately, this article traces how technological innovations such as the safety bicycle can be both disrupt but also uphold structures of power.

In recent weeks we have seen President, Donald J. Trump, and his appointed Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, attempt to dismantle the very foundations on which public education was built upon. According to a draft of the President's education budget proposal, which was obtained by the Washington Post, Trump plans to cut federal education programs to the tune of $10.6 billion. In this executive push for school choice, Trump plans on eliminating 22 federally funded programs while allocating most of the budget cuts to expanding charter schools and funding school vouchers for private and religious schools. These budget cuts are expected to affect the families of disadvantaged students as well as many college graduates that have acquired student loan debt.

This paper is a part of the State of Black Baltimore 2015 book published by the Greater Baltimore Urban League.  It examines the impact of racial segregation, disinvestment, development, and serial forced displacement on Black Baltimore neighborhoods.  Organizing and policy solutions are offered to help address the damage caused by racist policies.

You can buy the entire book at this link: http://www.eventbrite.com/e/state-of-black-baltimore-book-tickets-205415403

#AnneMoody

This paper presents a timeline of the life history of civil rights pioneer Anne Moody, who wrote the classic, Coming of Age in Mississippi. She was born in 1940 near Centreville, Miss., and she died in 2015 in Gloster, Miss. Surprisingly, little is known about her life beyond the publication of her book in 1968.

Her book chronicles her life as a poor black girl growing up under harsh conditions during segregation in Mississippi. In vivid and sometimes heartbreaking details, she gives a riveting account of her personal experiences at a time when black people could be lynched for speaking their minds. Her writing is raw and graphic. She gives a shocking and gritty look at Mississippi’s history. She writes of her struggle for civil rights and her prominent role in the movement. She also shares the stories of others who made sacrifices for freedom and justice.

This paper provides key moments and important dates in Moody’s life history. It offers an overview of her life -- and events related to her story -- from 1940 to the present. The timeline will be updated periodically as new information becomes available.

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Author’s Note:

Questions about the Anne Moody History Project may be directed to Roscoe Barnes III via email at doctorbarnes3@gmail.com or roscoebarnes3@yahoo.com For updates on Anne Moody history and the on-going work of this community service project, please follow AMHP on Twitter (@AnneMoodyHP). Ideas and suggestions are also welcomed.

The punitive dimensions of the present have its roots in the pseudo-science of Eugenics, which permeated the early 20th century. In 1912, the California Genealogical Society began making plans for the first International Congress of Genealogy, that forged connections to the the International Congress of Eugenics. There were more connections made at the PPIE, where  Birth of a Nation opened in SF days after it opened .  Eugenics and genealogy provided a justification for white privilege with an interlocking system of Jim Crow laws, films, presentations, publications and entertainments that only expanded after the fair.

Racial discrimination has long been a part of human history, in fact, it is rather critical and considered a crucial subject, for this reason, it is preferred and discussed in various fields including politics, literature, and cinema. Green Book is a full-length movie that could be classified as one of the respected movies that chose to be inclusive of this issue. It is directed by Peter Farrelly and it fictionalises a true story that took place in the United States during the 1960’s. At that specific time period, the United States was not a fully safe place, the community was little open-minded and racial discrimination was very common, in fact, it was operating in a way that sublimates white supremacy. In the light of these, Green Book adapts the harsh reality of a white-dominated society into a screenplay by foregrounding the relationship between Don Shirley who is an African American jazz and classical pianist, and his driver, Frank Vallelonga who is an Italian American bouncer. Their relationship is rather paradoxical considering the fact that one is the ‘inferior’ Black and the other is ‘superior’ White, however, their character traits, inner conflicts, and complexes help them to establish a strong bond. Don Shirley is a Black person and for that reason, he is accepted to conform to some subcultural norms that are constructed by the colonial centre however, he has established himself as a famous pianist which comes into conflict with his cultural background. On the other hand, Frank Vallelonga is a White person and seems to fit in the dominant society, he even expresses racist attitudes several times which comes into conflict with his cultural background as well, because as an Italian American his presence in the United States could therefore be taken into consideration as ‘immigrant’. Within this framework, both their relationship and the tour that they go on through the Deep South and Midwest demonstrate the sociocultural dynamics of the United States. As the title of the movie also indicates, the United States’ government pursues a separate but equal policy during that time period, and throughout the movie, the audience witnesses various levels of segregation, otherization, and marginalisation that are represented through the concepts of race and class. In this respect, this article attempts to analyse the movie Green Book in terms of socio-cultural dynamics, social order, and character analyses by deconstructing the interrelated politics of identity and class.

Christopher Buck, “Harlem Renaissance.” Encyclopedia of African American History. Edited by Leslie Alexander & Walter Rucker. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2010. Pp. 795–799 (Vol. 3). 

ABSTRACT

For all its failings, the Harlem Renaissance (1917–1934) (originally called the “Negro Renaissance”) was a spectacular success—spectacular because it was, in fact, a spectacle, a public exhibition of African American poetry, prose, drama, art, and music. This was not just “art for art’s sake,” but art to redraw the public image of “colored” people in America. Enjoying a “double audience” of black and white, the Harlem Renaissance was the fairest fruit of the New Negro movement, whose mission it was to bring about racial renewal through cultural diplomacy.

The Harlem Renaissance was not only a golden age of African American arts, but a valiant effort to remove the masks of racial stereotypes in order to put a new face on African Americans. To a certain degree, it not only improved race relations somewhat (a nearly impossible task, given the entrenched racial prejudices of the day), but instilled a racial pride and nobility among African Americans whose lives the Harlem Renaissance touched.

The chief strategist and “voice” of this cultural movement was philosopher Alain Locke (1885–1954), who edited the premiere and pivotal anthology of the Harlem Renaissance, The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925), which is described later. As the first African American Rhodes Scholar in 1907, Locke studied abroad in Oxford (1907–1910) and the University of Berlin (1910–1911), before receiving his PhD in philosophy from Harvard in 1918. Locke figures prominently in the Harlem Renaissance and served as its principal art critic, promoter, and power broker.

One can say that Alain Locke further democratized American democracy in paving the way for the Civil Rights movement. During the Jim Crow era of American apartheid, when civil rights were white rights (under Plessy v. Ferguson’s “separate-but-equal” doctrine), Locke was the real genius behind the Harlem Renaissance, which David Levering Lewis (Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of W. E. B. Du Bois) aptly characterized as a movement that sought to achieve “Civil Rights by Copyright.”

As the acknowledged “dean” of the Harlem Renaissance, Locke may well be regarded as the Martin Luther King of African American culture. Locke’s anthology, The New Negro, has been hailed as the first “national book” of African Americans. He ingeniously used culture as a strategy for ameliorating racism and for winning the respect of powerful white elites as potential agents for social and political transformation.

LOCKE, ALAIN

Christopher Buck, “Locke, Alain.” Encyclopedia of African American History. Edited by Leslie Alexander & Walter Rucker. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2010. Pp. 224–227 (Vol. 1). 

ABSTRACT

History remembers Alain Locke (1885–1954) as the first African American Rhodes Scholar (1907) and, more famously, as the “dean” of the Harlem Renaissance (1919– 1934). Locke edited The New Negro (1925), acclaimed as the “first national book” of African Americans. In this way, Locke’s role is analogous to that of Martin Luther King: whereas King championed the civil rights of African Americans through nonviolent civil disobedience, Locke did so through a process known as “civil rights by copyright.” In the Jim Crow era, when blacks had no effective political recourse, Locke used the arts as a strategy to win the respect of the white majority and to call to their attention the need to fully democratize democracy and Americanize America by extending full equality to all minorities.

Recent scholarship has brought Locke back to life, and his philosophy of democracy, in particular, lends him renewed importance. Harvard, Harlem, Haifa—place names that represent Locke’s special involvement in philosophy, art, and religion—are keys to understanding his life and thought. Harvard prepared Locke for distinction as the first black Rhodes Scholar in 1907 and, in 1918, awarded Locke his PhD in philosophy, thus securing his position as chair of the Department of Philosophy at Howard University from 1927 until his retirement in 1953. Harlem was the mecca of the Harlem Renaissance, whereby Locke, as a spokesman for his race, revitalized racial solidarity and fostered the group consciousness among African Americans that proved a necessary precondition of the Civil Rights movement. Haifa is the world center of the Bahá’í Faith, the religion to which Locke converted in 1918, the same year he received his doctorate from Harvard. Until recently, this has been the least understood aspect of Locke’s life.

During the Jim Crow era, at a time when black people saw little possibility of interracial harmony, this new religious movement offered hope through its “race amity” efforts, which Locke was instrumental in organizing. These three spheres of activity—the academy, the art world, and spiritual society—converge to create a composite picture of Locke as an integrationist whose model was not assimilation, but rather “unity through diversity” (the title of one of his Bahá’í World essays).

*Winner of the 2018 International Writing Centers Association Best Article Award. Disciplinary histories of composition studies argue that the mission of communication programs shifted during World War II: from striving to democratize higher education to promoting uncritical patriotism. Historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) rarely figure into these histories, in part because they seldom appeared in the era’s scholarly publications. Recently digitized African American newspaper archives invite a counter narrative of wartime democratizing pedagogy. Press coverage highlights the Hampton Institute Communications Center, the most widely publicized and politicized site of literacy instruction during the war. The controversy it engendered shows Hampton and other HBCU curricula forwarding wartime literacies that constituted patriotic resistance to Jim Crow segregation.

This seminar paper sheds light on the autobiographical influences in Richard Wright's non-fiction work. Many incidences in his childhood and early adult life have caused persistent scars in Wrights psyche that can also be detected in recurring themes in his literary work.

Christopher Buck, “’Abdu’l-Baha’s 1912 Howard University Speech: A Civil War Myth for Interracial Emancipation.” ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s Journey West: The Course of Human Solidarity. Edited by Negar Mottahedeh. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Pp. 111–144. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/9781137032010.0009.

EXCERPT:

In his 1912 Howard University speech, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá invoked the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation in essentialist terms, anchored in historical generalizations, as a rhetorical strategy for promoting interracial emancipation. Abolition of slavery was a first step in the progressive emancipation of African Americans within color-bound American society. Slavery’s roots run deep in American history, and are yet to be fully extirpated. They extend, in more subtle forms, down to the present. Racism is a ghost of the slaver’s psyche, and legislation alone cannot eradicate the problem. Something profoundly different is needed to significantly steer social history in a new direction. This is what makes ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s 1912 sojourn in America of such historical import. . . .

To recapitulate, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, in his Howard University speech, emphasized the personal sacrifice of Northern whites for Southern blacks in the course of the Civil War, and that African Americans (as the descendants of emancipated slaves) should therefore be grateful to whites in kind. In so saying, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá invoked history (or a certain view of it) in order to make history—by completing the unfinished work of the Emancipation Proclamation. . . .

And so it is that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá tasked the whites with a mission equal to the objectives of the Civil War, Emancipation, and Reconstruction in achieving what was (and is) still undone, to “endeavor to promote your [i.e. African Americans’] advancement and enhance your honor.” Such interracial unity entails more than fostering interracial camaraderie. Advancement is required. Actual progress must be fostered, for it is this “advancement” that “will be the cause of love (sabab-i maḥabbat).” In other words, doing “good” (by tangible actions) is a precondition for “goodwill” (as an intangible feeling). This, indeed, was the mission of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded in 1909, as an interracial endeavor. . . .

The advancement of African Americans was an integral element in the progress of America as a nation, and so there is a strong argument that the development of its own social capital was in the nation’s enlightened self-interest. Here, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s rhetorical strategy was to establish a clear basis, anchored in American history, for overcoming entrenched antagonisms in favor of reciprocal appreciation in the interests of interracial harmony and cooperation. In that sense, the accuracy of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s historical generalizations is quite beside the point, as the focus was on fostering racial healing and solving America’s racial crisis. . . .

On February 1, 2012, Cornel West, professor of African American Studies and Religion, Princeton University, expressed his appreciation of the Bahá’í efforts to foster ideal race relations: “When you talk about race and the legacy of white supremacy, there’s no doubt that when the history is written, the true history is written, the history of this country, the Baha’i Faith will be one of the leaven in the American loaf that allowed the democratic loaf to expand because of the anti-racist witness of those of Baha’i faith.” (“Cornel West praises work of Baha’is in establishing Racial Unity” (February 1, 2012). Professor West here recognizes the leavening influence of the Bahá’ís in the history of race relations in America. . . .

‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s 1912 Howard University speech was for then, yet it has a message for us now as well: It could be said that in his Howard speech, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá invited his audience to build on history by making history, in commencing a new era of global solidarity.

https://www.academia.edu/29904876/_Abdu_l-Baha_s_1912_Howard_University_Speech_A_Civil_War_Myth_for_Interracial_Emancipation_2013_

Buck, Christopher. “Alain Locke and Cultural Pluralism.” Search for Values: Ethics in Baha’i Thought. Edited by Seena Fazel and John Danesh. Los Angeles: Kalimat Press, 2004. Pp. 94–158.

African American philosopher Alain Locke is arguably the most profound and important Western Bahá’í philosopher to date. Except for one 1979 article in a Bahá’í periodical, scholarship on Locke has neither seriously taken into account his Bahá’í identity nor the Faith’s influence on his work. The present study, based largely on archival sources, contributes to research on this “missing” dimension of Locke’s complex life and thought. It examines Locke’s worldview as a Bahá’í, his secular perspective as a philosopher, and the synergy between his confessional and professional essays. This study also argues that Locke had a fluid hierarchy of values—of loyalty, tolerance, reciprocity, cultural relativism and pluralism (the philosophical equivalent of “unity in diversity”)—and that this hierarchy represents a progression and application of quintessentially Bahá’í ideals. Locke’s distinction as a “Bahá’í philosopher” may therefore be justified on ideological as well as historical grounds. Locke “translated” Bahá’í ideals “into more secular terms” so that “a greater practical range will be opened up for the application and final vindication of the Bahá’í principles” in order to achieve “a positive multiplication of spiritual power.”

Uncle Tom's Uncle presents my view that the extension of Reparations to Black Americans for the crime of slavery, the social practices of Jim Crow, marginalization, segregation, racism, etc., will not solve the problems of the Black Community.  Special note: I'm Black.

I believe that a resuscitation of pre-1960s values will win, for the Black Community, hundreds of years of SELF-GENERATED "Reparations" and reproduce the independent institutions we created even during segregation.  Institutions such as black-owned and operated banks, insurance companies, HOSPITALS, mini-supermarkets, doctors offices, dental offices, etc.

More importantly, those values will assure for the creation and maintenance of strong nuclear families that will pass down those values and, thus, assure a successful and productive Black community into the infinite future.

Last, I believe that the push, by the Democratic Party, for Reparations for Black folks, is no more than a PLOY, by that political party, to obtain Black votes for the purpose of securing and maintaining political power, NOT because of any real concern for Black people.

Patterson, Monica Eileen. “Teaching Tolerance Through Objects of Hatred: The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia as “Counter Museum”.” In Curating Difficult Knowledge: Violent Pasts in Public Places, edited by Erica Lehrer, Cynthia Milton, and Monica Eileen Patterson, 55-70. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

This spring break, thousands of Canadian college and university students will head south to Cuba. They are among the more than one million Canadians who will flock to Cuba this winter to relax on the white sandy beaches of the affordable Caribbean island. While soaking up the sunshine, most of these tourists will also shop for the nation’s trademark rum, cigars and other souvenirs that will remind them of their Cuban experience for years to come. Undoubtedly, some of the Cuban curios they purchase will be gifted to friends and family members.

But if you are one of those millions bringing a souvenir home, think twice before filling your suitcase with mementos from the island.

As a professor of anthropology and history, I was surprised to find rows upon rows of racist memorabilia during a recent trip to Cuba. These souvenirs, including sculptures, figurines and wall hangings, draw from a range of familiar images and ideas used across the globe for centuries to normalize the subjugation of Africans and Black people in contexts ranging from colonial Africa to the Jim Crow era in the United States.

Christopher Buck, Alain Locke: Faith and Philosophy. Los Angeles: Kalimat Press, 2005. Pub date: July 3, 2005. ISBN-13: 978-1890688387. ISBN-10: 189068838X. L

In print. (Order from Kalimat Press: http://www.kalimat.com/Locke.html.)

REVIEWS
•  Derik Smith. World Order 38.3 (2006/2007): 42–48. (Published in 2008.): ”Christopher Buck’s recent book, Alain Locke: Faith and Philosophy, is a welcome addition to the literature on early twentieth-century American and African American culture. But, perhaps more important, Buck’s study is a significant contribution to scholarship on the history of the Bahá’í Faith in the United States. … Any future study of Locke must necessarily make its way through Christopher Buck’s Alain Locke: Faith and Philosophy. The scholar forcefully proves his thesis that, in Locke’s thinking, philosophy and religious belief operated as synergistic terms. He has shown that the Bahá’í Faith was integral to Locke’s life and ideology. …  Yet, after reading Buck’s work, it is difficult to imagine Locke the philosopher rapt in prayer. Of course, this is not a shortcoming of the book. Rather it is an indication that, while he may have wanted to portray a more pious figure, Buck maintains the vow he made in his introduction to Alain Locke: Faith and Philosophy “to constrain any grandiose claims on Locke as a Bahá’í.”

• M. Anthony Fitchue. Journal of African American History 92.1 (Winter 2007): 131–133: “But the jewels in this book are unmistakable. … Clearly, Buck has given voice to the men and women who not only put the Baha’i faith first in their lives, but also left key documents, personal letters, notes, and memoranda related to the life of philosopher Alain LeRoy Locke for future researchers to ponder and use for years to come.”

• William P. Collins. Insights (Library of Congress Professional Association Newsletter) 38.1–3 (Jan–Oct 2006): 10–12: “Both of these books [Lights of the Spirit and Alain Locke: Faith and Philosophy] go a long way toward correcting the historians’ failure to note the important role played by the Bahá’í Faith and prominent African-American Bahá’ís in the struggle for racial equality in the United States.”

A brief account of how Columbia Bible College became the first white institution of higher education in South Carolina voluntarily to racially integrate. This is a shorter version of an account also treated in a lengthier article "Sharing the Gospel in a Racially Segregated Society: The Case of Columbia Bible College, 1923-1963," which appears in the Oxford Univ. Press book "This Side of Heaven: Race, Ethnicity, and Christian Faith" (2007, edited by R. Priest and A. Nieves).

This article focuses on the Nazi perception and exploitation of American lynching in the prewar Third Reich. It explores how National Socialist policymakers and writers addressed violence within their own society by exploring racial persecution in the United States. In particular, they drew attention to mob violence and the spectacle murders of African Americans. How, they asked, could Germany build a racially pure society absent the alleged lawlessness of the United States? Ultimately, the lynched black body became a symbol of “racial chaos” and juridical confusion across the Atlantic. If the Nazis were to design an effective racial order, they would have to regulate visible expressions of extra-legal violence.

Winter, Aaron. 2018. ‘The Klan is History: a historical perspective on the revival of the far-right in ‘post-racial’ America’. Historical Perspectives on Organised Crime and Terrorism. eds. J. Windle, J. Morrison, A. Winter and A. Silke. Abingdon: Routledge SOLON Explorations in Crime and Criminal Justice Histories. Chapter 7.

In this essay I develop W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness to demonstrate the limitations of Kant’s and Rawls’s models of self-respect. I argue that neither Kant nor Rawls can explain what self-respect and resistance to oppression warrants under the conditions of violent and systematic racial exclusion. I defend Du Bois’s proposal of voluntary black self-segregation during the Jim Crow era and explain why Du Bois believes that the black American community has a moral right to assert its self-respect by mitigating exposure to racial violence and animus in a white-controlled polity.

In 1910, the Baltimore City Council passed the nation’s first racial-zoning law. It was not the city’s first effort to eliminate even the possibility of racially integrated neighborhoods. In fact, the movement in favor of residential-segregation ordinances was a response to (its proponents believed) the school system’s failure to use Jim Crow schools to create Jim Crow neighborhoods. The Supreme Court invalidated housing segregation laws like Baltimore’s in 1917, but they turned out to be forerunners of all the other tools generations of city officials, white property owners, and realtors used and still use to maintain racially homogeneous neighborhoods nationwide—like exclusionary zoning. Thanks to these public policies, and to the still segregated schools that inspired them, American cities today are sorted beyond the wildest imaginings of any Progressive-era segregationist.

In this chapter, I develop a pragmatic defense of critical patriotism, one that recognizes the many personal and social benefits of patriotic sentiment yet which is also infused with a passion for justice. Though the argument is pragmatic given the ubiquity of patriotic sentiment, I argue that critical patriotism
is able to reconcile a love of one’s country with an ardent determination to reform and improve it.

As my entry points to the ''strange fruits of aftermaths' in the title, I examine three documents, each written approximately 50 years apart.  In reverse chronological order, they are a 1958 description of the funeral of a former family servant; a review of George Spring Merriam's 1906 volume, 'The Negro and the Nation'; and Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address of 1865.  Together, these three documents illustrate different but interconnected strands of aftermath:  1) the construction of a nostalgic view of slavery which helped perpetuate notions of white supremacy; 2) the impact of scientific racism on the struggle for racial justice and 3) the construction of what Saidya Hartman has called the 'fiction of debt'. 
This paper is based on a chapter from my doctoral thesis, and is not currently published.  Therefore, please do not cite it without my permission.

This article examines the intimate encounters between Japanese women and African American servicemen in post–World War II Japan and the ways in which these intimacies challenged American racial politics that were reproduced in Occupied Japan, while at the same time reaffirmed American heterosexual masculine power and the subordination of Japanese women. It interrogates the gendered politics of the historical conception of Afro-Asian solidarity, and contributes to studies of the Black Pacific by considering these interracial intimacies as sites of potent marriage rights discursive production in the postwar years.

Christopher Buck, “Alain Locke: Baha’i Philosopher.” Baha’i Studies Review 10 (2001/2002): 7–49. 

ABSTRACT

African American philosopher Alain Locke is arguably the most profound and important western Bahá’í philosopher to date. Except for Ernest Mason’s 1979 World Order article, scholarship on Locke has neither seriously taken into account his Bahá’í identity nor its influence on his work. The present study, based largely on archival sources, will contribute to research on this “missing” dimension of Locke’s complex life and thought. This study examines Locke’s worldview as a Bahá’í, his secular perspective as a philosopher, and the synergy between his confessional and professional essays. This study also argues that Locke had a fluid hierarchy of values—of loyalty, tolerance, reciprocity, cultural relativism and pluralism (the philosophical equivalent of “unity in diversity”)—and that this hierarchy represents a progression and application of quintessentially Bahá’í ideals. Locke’s distinction as a “Bahá’í philosopher” may therefore be justified on ideological as well as historical grounds. Locke “translated” Bahá’í ideals “into more secular terms” so that “a greater practical range will be opened up for the application and final vindication of the Bahá’í principles” in order to achieve “a positive multiplication of spiritual power.”

What are the end results of Stop and Frisk policies across the United States? This research sheds light on a possible hypothesis looking at one city in particular, New York, where the end result of this policy could be a form of police containment that results in segregation. Indeed, this research strongly suggests through the use of GIS analysis that there are currently 10 out of 77 police precincts in New York City that are being segregated by the police, where people's Right to City has been trampled upon.

Buck, Christopher. “David Bottoms.” American Writers, Supplement XXVIII. Ed. Jay Parini. Farmington Hills, MI: Charles Scribner’s Sons/The Gale Group, 2018. Pp. 21–36. ISBN-13: 978-0684325170. (Published/Released September 2017.)

EXCERPT
A particularly poignant poem is “Stumptown Attends the Picture Show,” which, as the poet indicates right after the title, is “on the first attempt at desegregation in Canton, Georgia” (AH, p. 14):
______________
Word has come and Martha the ticket girl
stands behind the candy counter
eating popcorn and smoking Salems.
Beside her the projectionist,
having canned the Vivien Leigh
and come downstairs to watch the real show,
leans folding chairs against the theater doors,
guards his glass counter
like saloon keepers in his Westerns
guard the mirrors hung above their bars.

Outside, good old boys line the sidewalk,
string chain between parking meters
in front of the Canton Theater,
dig in like Rebs in a Kennesaw trench.
From the street, policeman and sheriff’s deputies
address their threats to proper names,
try to maintain any stability.
Someone has already radioed the State Boys.

Through the glass door Martha watches
the moon slide over the Jones Mercantile.
In front of Landers’ Drugstore
a streetlight flickers like a magic lantern,
but Martha cannot follow the plot,
neither can the projectionist.

Only one thing is certain:
elements from different worlds are converging,
spinning toward confrontation,
and the State Boys are winding down some country road,
moving in a cloud of dust towards the theater marquee.
______________
This poem never attracted the attention and critical claim that it rightly deserves. It is a masterpiece of understatement, an almost casual look at profound social change in progress, to which the ticket girl and projectionist are oblivious (“but Martha cannot follow the plot, / neither can the projectionist”).

In an almost documentary fashion, “Stumptown Attends the Picture Show” is a showpiece exemplifying the prevailing social “reptile brain” among many white Americans in the Deep South, so steeped as it was in racial prejudice. It is almost a perfect poem as a snapshot of that time and place, where Canton, Georgia, represents America at large.

The actual event took place on Monday, August 11, 1964, as four young African American men attempted to integrate the Canton Theater on Main Street. “Stumptown” is the nickname for an African American section of Canton, where David Bottoms grew up. We are never shown the attempted desegregation of the local movie theater (presumably by unnamed African Americans from Stumptown), but only the prelude (which could well have been the result of a wild rumor).

The siege mentality is strikingly depicted, and the poem’s ending—“Only one thing is certain: / elements from different worlds are converging, / spinning toward confrontation”— is as close as Bottoms ever comes to outright social commentary. …

Available in the Gale Virtual Reference Library (GVRL) database:

Christopher Buck, “Alain Locke.” American Writers: A Collection of Literary Biographies. Supplement XIV. Edited by Jay Parini. Farmington Hills, MI: Scribner’s Reference/The Gale Group, 2004. Pp. 195–219. (Available in the Gale Virtual Reference Library (GVRL) database.)  

ABSTRACT
ALAIN LEROY LOCKE—philosopher, race leader, art critic, adult educator, essayist, and anthologist—was the leading African American intellectual of his day after W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963). A social genius, Locke was the mastermind behind the Harlem Renaissance, that explosion in the 1920s and 1930s of “New Negro” literature, drama, music, and art that bolstered black pride and earned reciprocal white respect on a national scale never before achieved. The December 1925 publication of Locke’s anthology, The New Negro, was a stellar event in American cultural history. A volume that spoke volumes, The New Negro: An Interpretation was art as manifesto—a secular liberation theology. For this and other reasons Columbus Salley, in The Black 100 (1999), ranks Locke as the thirty-sixth most influential African American in history. Alain Leroy Locke is the Martin Luther King Jr. of American culture.

Locke was a “prophet of democracy,” whose grand (though not systematic) theory of democracy sequenced local, moral, political, economic, and cultural stages of democracy as they arced through history, with racial, social, spiritual, and world democracy completing the trajectory. Adjunct notions of natural, practical, progressive, creative, intellectual, equalitarian democracy crystallized the paradigm. Seeing America as “a unique social experiment,” Locke’s larger goal was to “Americanize Americans,” with the simple yet profound message that equality benefits everyone and that democracy itself is at stake. The essence of Locke’s philosophy of democracy is captured in the title “Cultural Pluralism: A New Americanism,” a public lecture he gave at Howard University on November 8, 1950. In raising democracy to a new level of consciousness, Locke internationalized the race issue, making the crucial connection between American race relations and international relations. Racial justice, he predicted, would serve as a social catalyst of world peace. Thus there are two major streams of thought in Locke’s work—the African American historical, cultural, and intellectual tradition, and a cosmopolitan, global outlook intensified by the Bahá’í principles he embraced. Locke is both a “race man” (cultural racialist) and a philosopher (cultural pluralist). How Locke should be read depends on which of these two roles predominates.

History has both immortalized and obscured Locke. Given his cynicism toward it in later life, it is ironic, although not surprising, that Locke should forever be associated with the Harlem Renaissance, much to the exclusion of his broader role as a cultural pluralist. With new information that has come to light regarding his Bahá’í identity, it is now possible to understand how Locke could function simultaneously as a cultural racialist and cultural pluralist. Together the two combine to produce “unity through diversity”—the Bahá’í principle that Locke held sacred. Locke’ s philosophy of democracy, which previous literature never holistically described, is the key to integrating the various facets of his thought. As a philosopher Locke had no appreciable impact in his own lifetime. In the end, however, he may enjoy a delayed influence. That will depend largely on whether the new information that recent scholarship has provided can bring Locke back to influential life as a prophet of democracy.