Southern Workman And Hampton School Record

The May or June issue of 1885-1900 (July issue of 1899) includes the report of the institute's president for 1885-1900.

After the Civil War, Emancipation purportedly brought physical freedom to African Americans. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, blacks continued to experience inequality in all phases of American life—social, cultural, political, and economic. In pursuit of equality, African American movements interpreted folklore to reveal in their rhetoric the soul of a race and a path toward civilization. This book provides a comprehensive chronicle of these competing initiatives and their reception starting with the folklore society organized by Hampton Institute in 1893 and continuing through the early 1940s with the American Negro Academy, Fisk University graduates, William Hannibal Thomas, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Urban League, the Friends of Negro Freedom, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, and blacks associated with the Communist Party USA. Disavowing a culture of fear, money, guns, and death, black folklorists in these movements exposed a racial inner life ranging from loving, loyal, and happy to imitative, tragic, spiritual, emotional, and creative. Each characterization of the race justified a distinct path and possible contributions to civilization. If unable to know their past, members of the movements and other folklorists were fearful that African Americans would be an anomaly among humanity.

In Uplift Cinema, Allyson Nadia Field recovers the significant yet forgotten legacy of African American filmmaking in the 1910s. Like the racial uplift project, this cinema emphasized economic self-sufficiency, education, and respectability as the keys to African American progress. Field discusses films made at the Tuskegee and Hampton Institutes to promote education, as well as the controversial The New Era, which was an antiracist response to D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation. She also shows how Black filmmakers in New York and Chicago engaged with uplift through the promotion of Black modernity. Uplift cinema developed not just as a response to onscreen racism, but constituted an original engagement with the new medium that has had a deep and lasting significance for African American cinema. Although none of these films survived, Field's examination of archival film ephemera presents a method for studying lost films that opens up new frontiers for exploring early film culture.

In the years following reconstruction, newly founded southern colleges for Afro-Americans admitted hundreds of black women students. The students left these schools imbued with Christian missionary zeal and a strong sense of racial solidarity. Determined to use their educations to benefit other Afro-Americans, they became indefatigable educators, social workers, nurses, and organizers of local and national groups dedicated to community improvement and social change. Afro-American Women of the South and the Advancement of the Race brings to light the remarkable accomplishments of these black women in public and private education, social welfare, public health, and civil rights. Through a detailed examination of black clubwomen's activities in Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, and Virginia, Cynthia Neverdon-Morton reveals the origins of female networks with national importance during the Progressive era and beyond. --From dust jacket.

Alphabetically-arranged entries from O to T that explores significant events, major persons, organizations, and political and social movements in African-American history from 1896 to the twenty-first-century.