Never Together: Black and White People in the Postwar Economic Era

This paper recounts American economic history for 60 years after World War II. The unusual part of this paper is that it focuses on not only the conventional tale, but also recounts what whites did to and for Blacks over this period. It starts from the unhappy experience of a Black American soldier, goes through the prosperity that followed the war and ends with the various changes that happened to the economy after 1970. The Civil Rights Movement is in the middle, and it gave rise to more Black education before racial segregation destroyed their gains. Some Blacks graduated from college and became a Black Elite. Obama’s election showed that the Black Elite could interact with relative equality with educated whites.

Divorce Trials and Sex Scandals

This chapter covers the coverage of sex scandals and divorce trials, which dominated black papers’ front pages in the mid-1920s. Many of these stories involved the black elite and the middle class. Black papers believed that the status of individuals involved in the scandals generated interest among a new and expanding reading audience. Newspapers, however, depicted different images of elite and middle-class black heterosexual relationships from the ones they carefully constructed. This chapter also argues that the Black Press revealed and spoke about what readers could not discuss in other public forums as it related to African American sexuality. Overall, the second chapter reveals how the coverage of divorce trials and sex scandals exposed class tensions among African Americans and, perhaps most importantly, made private sexual matters public.

The Black Creole Vision of Archibald J. Motley Jr.

This essay explores how Archibald J. Motley Jr. developed into the successful, notably iconoclastic, artist he became. In 1918, Motley announced his aesthetic independence, his embrace of “art for art’s sake,” in a manifesto in the Chicago Defender -- a significant precursor to later debates associated with an artistically-inclined New Negro movement dominated rhetorically by W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke. Unlike such Chicago peers as William Farrow and Charles C. Dawson, Motley pursued his exceptionalist path without artistic, social, or financial support from Chicago's Black elite. Motley also described himself as a black Creole, or "French Negro." This unique ethnic heritage, his racially-exclusive associations within the art world, and his residence in the overwhelmingly white Englewood neighborhood amplified his sense of uniqueness.

IMMIGRANT RIGHTS IN A DEEP SOUTH CITY

In 2010, the Alabama GOP took control of the state legislature for the first time since Reconstruction. The next year, in a sharply partisan vote, the legislature passed, and Governor Robert Bentley (R) signed into law, the Beason-Hammon Alabama Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act, also known as House Bill 56, the harshest immigration law in the country. This punitive state law was the impetus for Black elites in Birmingham to frame the immigration debate as a matter of civil rights and thus to see the issue in a new light. When Alabama Republicans moved to the Right on immigration, Black leaders in Birmingham moved Left. In this study, backed up by an event analysis of local newspapers, an analysis of interviews with members of the Black elite in Birmingham in 2013, who were previously interviewed in 2007, helps to substantiate this claim. In the summer of 2007, against the backdrop of an immigration debate in Washington, our Black elite study participants largely told us they had no stake in immigration. By 2013, many were willing to fight for immigrant rights at the highest level.