African Americans In Georgia

Provides an understanding of the intersection of race and region while addressing contemporary issues such as the future of elementary and higher education, the nature of health-care disparities, and voting and representation. The research presented here reveals that race and class-based problems remain, and geography often is a contributing factor to those differences.

The lush landscape and subtropical climate of the Georgia coast only enhance the air of mystery enveloping some of its inhabitants—people who owe, in some ways, as much to Africa as to America. As the ten previously unpublished essays in this volume examine various aspects of Georgia lowcountry life, they often engage a central dilemma: the region's physical and cultural remoteness helps to preserve the venerable ways of its black inhabitants, but it can also marginalize the vital place of lowcountry blacks in the Atlantic World. The essays, which range in coverage from the founding of the Georgia colony in the early 1700s through the present era, explore a range of topics, all within the larger context of the Atlantic world. Included are essays on the double-edged freedom that the American Revolution made possible to black women, the lowcountry as site of the largest gathering of African Muslims in early North America, and the coexisting worlds of Christianity and conjuring in coastal Georgia and the links (with variations) to African practices. A number of fascinating, memorable characters emerge, among them the defiant Mustapha Shaw, who felt entitled to land on Ossabaw Island and resisted its seizure by whites only to become embroiled in struggles with other blacks; Betty, the slave woman who, in the spirit of the American Revolution, presented a “list of grievances” to her master; and S'Quash, the Arabic-speaking Muslim who arrived on one of the last legal transatlantic slavers and became a head man on a North Carolina plantation. Published in association with the Georgia Humanities Council.

In Statesboro, Georgia, two schools coexisted: one white and the other black. Yet, these schools were intertwined by their geographical location and the traditions of the segregated South. There are many glaring similarities between the white students of Georgia Southern University's forerunner, the First District A&M School, and the black students of the Statesboro Industrial and High School. Yet as happened all too often in the South as implementation of the federal court's desegregation orders took shape, "Negro" schools were downgraded or outright closed. Statesboro was no different. While, First District A&M became a regional university, Statesboro Industrial and High School was downgraded to a junior high school. In 1961, integration on the higher-education level at Georgia's flagship university captured national attention. Few works if any have examined desegregation in the context of non-flagship universities. Likewise, there is a misguided mythology that desegregation occurred quietly at Georgia Southern University: it's clear that while there was not the violence and rioting seen elsewhere in Southern universities, blacks were marginalized and did not feel welcome at the college. A passive group after the initial integration, blacks adopted tactics of protest and confrontation to empower themselves. Taking a page from the Civil Rights Movement, black students and faculty established organizations to confront discrimination and gain access to campus leadership positions. This is a story about the defeats, victories, struggles, and developments of blacks at Georgia Southern University.

Published in 1951, this study looks at the social, economic, political, and historical aspects of the development of higher education for African Americans in Georgia.

In Show Thyself a Man, Gregory Mixon explores the ways African Americans in postbellum Georgia used the militia as a vehicle to secure full citizenship, respect, and a more stable place in society. As citizen-soldiers, black men were empowered to get involved in politics, secure their own financial independence, and publicly commemorate black freedom with celebrations such as Emancipation Day. White Georgians, however, used the militia as a different symbol of freedom--to ensure the postwar white right to rule. This book is a forty-year history of black militia service in Georgia and the determined disbandment process that whites undertook to destroy it, connecting this chapter of the post-emancipation South to the larger history of militia participation by African-descendant people through the Western hemisphere and Latin America.

In this engaging new visual history showcasing Macon's African Americans, vintage photographs illuminate the contributions and achievements of black citizens who have lived and worked in the heart of Georgia for more than one hundred and fifty years. Local landmarks, such as the Douglass Theater and the Harriet Tubman Museum, and unique African-American communities, such as Summerfield and Pleasant Hill, are testament to the indelible mark left on Macon by its enterprising black residents.

Reflecting a new commitment by American anthropologists to engage in what has been called the anthropology of racism, this book examines racism, class stratification and sexism as they bear on the African-American struggle for social justice, equality and cultural identity in the South.

In Search of Liberty explores how African Americans, since the founding of the United States, have understood their struggles for freedom as part of the larger Atlantic world. The essays in this volume capture the pursuits of equality and justice by African Americans across the Atlantic World through the end of the nineteenth century, as their fights for emancipation and enfranchisement in the United States continued. This book illuminates stories of individual Black people striving to escape slavery in places like Nova Scotia, Louisiana, and Mexico and connects their eff orts to emigration movements from the United States to Africa and the Caribbean, as well as to Black abolitionist campaigns in Europe. By placing these diverse stories in conversation, editors Ronald Angelo Johnson and Ousmane K. Power-Greene have curated a larger story that is only beginning to be told. By focusing on Black internationalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, In Search of Liberty reveals that Black freedom struggles in the United States were rooted in transnational networks much earlier than the better-known movements of the twentieth century.