The American Negro What He Was What He Is And What He May Become A Critical And Practical Discussion

A discussion of what the Negro can do to help himself advance in life. Written by a Negro who, although not descended from slaves, was himself raised in poverty & whose father had personal contact with fugitive slaves as a "conductor" on the Underground Railroad.

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Excerpt from The American Negro: What He Was, What He Is and What, He May Become, a Critical and Practical Discussion The title of this work is sufficiently explicit, I take it, to leave no room for doubt as to its general character, though there is a disposition in some quarters to use other terms than negro to designate that class of our people derived from African origin. For ordinary purposes, the inhabitants of this country may be fairly divided into white and colored classes. Nevertheless, such racial grouping is neither an exact nor a true ethnological designation of the American people, for the reason that it does not agree with known facts. For example, many persons of negroid ancestry, but white in color, are classed with the white race in communities ignorant of their negro origin. On the other hand, many Italians, Portuguese, Mexi cans, and Indians, are dark complexioned, but with out the least strain oi negro blood. Therefore, as there is such a thing as a distinctively negro people, and as it is in indisputable evidence that the Ameri can freed people were primarily derived from a genu ine negro stock, there is ample warrant for using the terms negro and negroid in designating the per son, as well as the forms of thought and action, characteristic of the descendants of such ancestors. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Excerpt from The American Negro: What He Was, What He Is and What, He May Become, a Critical and Practical Discussion The title of this work is sufficiently explicit, I take it, to leave no room for doubt as to its general character, though there is a disposition in some quarters to use other terms than negro to designate that class of our people derived from African origin. For ordinary purposes, the inhabitants of this country may be fairly divided into white and colored classes. Nevertheless, such racial grouping is neither an exact nor a true ethnological designation of the American people, for the reason that it does not agree with known facts. For example, many persons of negroid ancestry, but white in color, are classed with the white race in communities ignorant of their negro origin. On the other hand, many Italians, Portuguese, Mexicans, and Indians, are dark complexioned, but without the least strain of negro blood. Therefore, as there is such a thing as a distinctively negro people, and as it is in indisputable evidence that the American freed people were primarily derived from a genuine negro stock, there is ample warrant for using the terms negro and negroid in designating the person, as well as the forms of thought and action, characteristic of the descendants of such ancestors. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

The structure of the African American family has been a recurring theme in American discourse on the African American community. The role of African American mothers especially has been the cause of heated debates since the time of Reconstruction in the 19th century. The discourse, which often saw the African American family as something that needed fi xing, also put the issue of women’s reproductive rights on the political agenda. Taking a long-term perspective from the 1920s to the early 1990s, Anne Overbeck aims to show how normative notions of the American family infl uenced the perspective on the African American family, especially African American women. The book follows the negotiations on African American women’s reproductive rights within the context of eugenics, modernization theory, overpopulation, and the War on Drugs. Thereby it sets out to trace both continuities and changes in the discourse on the reproductive rights of African American women that still infl uence our perspective on the African American family today.

Between 1877 and 1930--years rife with tensions over citizenship, suffrage, immigration, and "the Negro problem--African American activists promoted an array of strategies for progress and power built around "racial destiny," the idea that black Americans formed a collective whose future existence would be determined by the actions of its members. In Righteous Propagation, Michele Mitchell examines the reproductive implications of racial destiny, demonstrating how it forcefully linked particular visions of gender, conduct, and sexuality to collective well-being. Mitchell argues that while African Americans did not agree on specific ways to bolster their collective prospects, ideas about racial destiny and progress generally shifted from outward-looking remedies such as emigration to inward-focused debates about intraracial relationships, thereby politicizing the most private aspects of black life and spurring race activists to calcify gender roles, monitor intraracial sexual practices, and promote moral purity. Examining the ideas of well-known elite reformers such as Mary Church Terrell and W. E. B. DuBois, as well as unknown members of the working and aspiring classes, such as James Dubose and Josie Briggs Hall, Mitchell reinterprets black protest and politics and recasts the way we think about black sexuality and progress after Reconstruction.