An African American Educator in the Context of His Time: George Washington Trenholm, 1871–1925

2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 246-267
Author(s):  
Michael Fultz
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
George Washington ◽  
American Educator

Rethinking Racial, Ethnoracial, and Imperial Categories: Key Concepts in Comparative Race Studies in the History of Education

2020 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
pp. 657-669
Author(s):  
Kim Cary Warren
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Native American ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Educational Leaders ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
History Of ◽  
Native American Tribes ◽  
American Teacher ◽  
American Educator

While researching racially segregated education, I came across speeches delivered in the 1940s by two educational leaders—one a black man and the other a Native American man. G. B. Buster, a longtime African American teacher, implored his African American listeners to work with white Americans on enforcing equal rights for all. A few years before Buster delivered his speech, Henry Roe Cloud (Winnebago), a Native American educator, was more critical of white Americans, specifically the federal government, which he blamed for destroying American Indian cultures. At the same time, Roe Cloud praised more recent federal efforts to preserve cultural practices, study traditions before they completely disappeared, and encourage self-government among Native American tribes.

The Creole Synthesis in the New World

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher J. Smith
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
North America ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
New World ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
George Washington ◽  
Blackface Minstrelsy ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
British Colonies

This chapter examines the musical, cultural, and sociological elements of blackface minstrelsy's “creole synthesis” throughout the Caribbean and the British colonies of North America. It argues that the conditions for the creole synthesis were present virtually from the first encounters of Anglo-Europeans and Africans in the New World. The chapter discusses the riverine, maritime, and frontier social contexts that shaped the music of blackface's African American sources and their Anglo-Celtic imitators. In particular, it considers creole synthesis in the Caribbean and in frontiers such as New Orleans and the Ohio. It also looks at a preliminary example of iconographic analysis that reflects the riverine and maritime creole synthesis: James Henry Beard's 1846 painting Western Raftsmen. The chapter contends that blackface minstrelsy was pioneered by George Washington Dixon and Thomas Dartmouth Rice in the 1830s and codified by Joel Walker Sweeney and Daniel Decatur Emmett (and the blackface troupes they founded) in the early 1840s, and thus represents the earliest comparatively accurate and extensive observation, description, and imitation of African American performance in the New World.

George Washington Williams’s Stern Duty of History

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ira Dworkin
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African American Students ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
George Washington ◽  
Hampton Institute ◽  
Untimely Death ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
American Interest ◽  
American Students ◽  
History Of

This chapter begins at Hampton Institute in 1889 where Williams traveled after meeting in Belgium with King Leopold II. Williams, whose interest in the Congo predates the 1884-1885 Berlin Conference, went to Hampton to enlist African American students to travel with him to Africa, which framed his Congo trip within a tradition of ongoing African American interest in Africa. Williams’s initial optimism for the Congo quickly soured, and he wrote a series of open letters--to Leopold, U.S. President Benjamin Harrison, and railroad magnate Collis P. Huntington--that inspired opposition to Leopold’s regime that continued well after Williams’s untimely death in 1891. An examination of Williams’s struggles to develop and define a relationship to the Belgian empire against the backdrop of the history of the transatlantic slave trade reveals an African American connection to Africa that is grounded in a global political landscape of emancipation and anti-imperialism.

The Blessing of Ham: Genesis 9:1 in Early African American Biblical Scholarship

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Jeremy Schipper
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
George Washington ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Much of the recent scholarship on Noah’s curse (Genesis 9:20–27) has focused on how the myth of Ham has factored into debates over slavery and other anti-Black biblical interpretations. Yet Sylvester A. Johnson argues convincingly that in the late nineteenth century, the “myth of Ham” was used primarily to explain racial origins rather than to justify or condemn slavery. To provide nuance to Johnson’s point, this article argues that some influential nineteenth-century African American scholars whom Johnson discusses interpreted the story of racial origins in the myth of Ham as an outgrowth of a divine blessing that Ham shared with his brothers in Genesis 9:1–19. This blessing, they argued, was unrelated to Noah’s curse of Canaan in Genesis 9:20–27. This article focuses on the exegetical arguments made by James W. C. Pennington, Alexander Crummell, Benjamin Tucker Tanner, and George Washington Williams.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ira Dworkin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
Black People ◽  
The United States ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
George Washington ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
Trayvon Martin

The conclusion notes the ways that Malcolm X’s criticism of U.S. policy in the Congo, which he finds consistent with a larger disregard for the lives of Black people, globally conceived, is echoed in the words and actions of Black Lives Matter activists, who organized following the murder of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, and the failure to prosecute his killer. Sanford is a town founded by Henry Shelton Sanford, who represented the United States at the Berlin Conference and worked as a lobbyist for King Leopold II, which helped to fund his Florida empire. This chapter notes that Sanford was directly at odds with George Washington Williams during their lifetime and up until their deaths, which suggests that the Congo appears as an integral part of the landscape of U.S. racial violence and that African American critics of colonialism have always been willing to use their voices to say so.

Sowing the Seeds of Southern Liberalism

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew McNeill Canady
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Race Relations ◽  
Blue Ridge ◽  
The South ◽  
George Washington ◽  
Racial Issues ◽  
Conference Center ◽  
Black Mountain

Chapter 3 examines the most important institution that Weatherford guided in his life, the Blue Ridge Assembly (a YMCA summer conference center in Black Mountain, N.C.) and the efforts he made there to improve race relations. Under Weatherford’s guidance in the 1910s and 1920s, the facility hosted African American speakers (among them George Washington Carver, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Robert Russa Moton) and students. These guests always endured some form of segregation during their stays, but their presence and interaction with whites are notable because such events were extremely rare at the time. Indeed, up until 1930 Blue Ridge was one of the few places in the South where such visits could occur and where the topic of race could be discussed. This chapter looks closely at the context of the South at the time, the limits to the programs at Blue Ridge, and why Weatherford did not push harder against segregation. It also illuminates the influence of this institution on a growing number of white liberals of the next era and how this place sowed the seeds of their activism. Finally, it explores the changing procedures Weatherford and Blue Ridge employed in handling racial issues.

Race, “Realism,” and Fate in Frederick Delius’s Koanga

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Saylor
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Folk Music ◽  
West African ◽  
George Washington ◽  
Black Characters

This chapter examines how race intersects with questions of “realism” and fate in Frederick Delius's Koanga, which features black characters as its protagonists as well as examples of African American folk music. Based on an episode from George Washington Cable's novel The Grandissimes, Koanga is a nineteenth-century story of love, jealousy, and betrayal centered on Koanga, an enslaved West African prince and voudon priest, and Palmyra, a quadroon maidservant. This chapter first provides a background on Koanga's genesis and textual variations before discussing its seeming contradiction: the dramatic portrayal of Koanga and Palmyra as a reflection of period beliefs about the Otherness of blacks; and its treatment of the exoticism of “blackness,” both physical and musical, as an attractive quality integral to achieving its dramatic and musical aims. It argues that Koanga revives many familiar tropes of racial exoticism and manifests troubling new resonances concerning questions of destiny and free will.

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