Dislocating the color line: identity, hybridity, and singularity in African-American narrative

1997 ◽  
Vol 35 (04) ◽  
pp. 35-1982-35-1982
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Color Line

Navigating Civil Rights and Black Power Struggles

2020 ◽  
pp. 137-158
Author(s):  
Joe William Trotter
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
American Politics ◽  
Black Power ◽  
The Political ◽  
Color Line ◽  
Power Struggles ◽  
Urban League ◽  
National Headquarters ◽  
The 1960S

By the mid-1960s, the political and social terrain on which the Urban League worked had changed dramatically. The Pittsburgh-born children of southern black migrants had come of age and pushed hard against the color line in the city's economy, politics, and institutions. National headquarters and local branches across the country worried about the increasing black nationalist turn in African American politics. But the ULP had helped to establish the postwar groundwork and even models for the fluorescence and even militance of Pittsburgh's Civil Rights and Black Power struggles of the 1960s and early 1970s.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew J. Cressler
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Color Line ◽  
African American Religion ◽  
Black Catholics ◽  
Catholic History

This chapter begins with the ten Black bishops declaring in 1984 that Black Catholics should be “authentically Black and truly Catholic.” It contrasts this statement with the story of Mary Dolores Gadpaille, who argued in 1958 that Catholicism “lifted her up above the color line.” It juxtaposes these two examples in order to introduce readers to the central questions that govern the book. Why did tens of thousands of African Americans convert to Catholicism in the middle decades of the twentieth century? What did it mean to be Black and Catholic in the first half of the twentieth century and why did it change so dramatically in the thirty years that separated Gadpaille from the bishops? How would placing Black Catholics at the center of our historical narratives change the ways we understand African American religion and Catholicism in the United States? The chapter situates the book in scholarship and briefly introduces readers to Black Catholic history writ large.

Combating Inequality in the Postwar City

2020 ◽  
pp. 115-136
Author(s):  
Joe William Trotter
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
African American ◽  
Labor Unions ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Economic Restructuring ◽  
African American Community ◽  
Color Line ◽  
Public Officials ◽  
Urban Political Economy ◽  
Organizing Center

Despite significant achievements during the interwar years, the Pittsburgh branch encountered the persistence and even intensification of racial inequality in the postwar urban political economy. Deindustrialization, urban renewal, neighborhood depopulation, and global economic restructuring reinforced the color line in mid-20th century Pittsburgh. The Urban League emerged at the organizing center of early efforts to offset the destructive impact of these local, national, and transnational developments on the city's African American community. The agency pressed employers, public officials, and labor unions to increase opportunities for African Americans in a broad range of skilled, clerical, and professional occupations and stimulated the growth of the black middle class.

Beauty along the Color Line: Lynching, Aesthetics, and the Crisis

PMLA ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 121 (5) ◽  
pp. 1443-1459 ◽  
Author(s):  
Russ Castronovo
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Race Relations ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Color Line ◽  
Political Struggle ◽  
Chronological Order ◽  
Jessie Fauset ◽  
Walter White

“What have we who are slaves and blacks to do with Art?” asked DuBois in his 1926 essay “Criteria of Negro Art.” In an era of lynching, art hardly seemed appropriate for political struggle. Nevertheless, DuBois and his colleagues at the Crisis risked making connections between lynching and art by putting aesthetics to democratic use even as the theatricality of ritualized violence gave lynching an aesthetic dimension. Starting with DuBois's manifesto and reading in reverse chronological order every issue of the Crisis to its first issue in 1910, this article re-creates a critical narrative that traces the development of aesthetic theory among African American writers associated with the NAACP's national magazine. Contextualizing DuBois's work in the Crisis with fiction by Jessie Fauset and Walter White, I examine an alternative aesthetics that relies on propaganda to assail the ugliness of race relations. (RC)

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