Current Search: black history (x)
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- Title
- Making Our Voices Heard: Power and Citizenship in Central Florida's Black Communities.
- Creator
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McPherson, Gramond, Cassanello, Robert, Lester, Connie, Walker, Ezekiel, University of Central Florida
- Abstract / Description
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This thesis examines the impacts of government policies on community mobilization in Orlando's Parramore neighborhood and the all-black town of Eatonville in Central Florida. The scope of this thesis covers the history of both communities from their formation in the 1880s to the end of the twentieth century. This research reveals the relationships between the predominantly black residents of Parramore and Eatonville and the largely white government officials over the development and...
Show moreThis thesis examines the impacts of government policies on community mobilization in Orlando's Parramore neighborhood and the all-black town of Eatonville in Central Florida. The scope of this thesis covers the history of both communities from their formation in the 1880s to the end of the twentieth century. This research reveals the relationships between the predominantly black residents of Parramore and Eatonville and the largely white government officials over the development and maintenance of each community. By understanding the social creation of both communities during the era of Jim Crow, this thesis reveals the differing levels of power each community possessed that would impact their ability to turn their defined black spaces into black places. Moving forward, each community had to adjust to the impacts of integration that weakened the communal bonds that helped the community endure Jim Crow. However, in detailing the rise of citizen activism in the post-World War II period, the theory of infrastructural citizenship shapes this thesis in revealing how black residents in Parramore and Eatonville exercised their rights as citizens in making their voices heard surrounding various infrastructural changes. While their efforts did not always achieve their ultimate goals, it forced decision makers to anticipate and accommodate the opinions of the residents impacted by these decisions. This thesis uses historical analysis to place Parramore and Eatonville within the broader social, political, and economic contexts of events occurring in Florida, the American South and the country at large.
Show less - Date Issued
- 2019
- Identifier
- CFE0007685, ucf:52494
- Format
- Document (PDF)
- PURL
- http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFE0007685
- Title
- Confrontational Christianity: Contextual Theology and Its Radicalization of the South African Anti-Apartheid Church Struggle.
- Creator
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Rodriguez, Miguel, Walker, Ezekiel, Sacher, John, Zhang, Hong, University of Central Florida
- Abstract / Description
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This paper is intended to analyze the contributions of Contextual Theology and Contextual theologians to dismantling the South African apartheid system. It is intended to demonstrate that the South African churches failed to effectively politicize and radicalize to confront the government until the advent of Contextual Theology in South Africa. Contextual Theology provided the Christian clergy the theological justification to unite with anti-apartheid organizations. Its very concept of...
Show moreThis paper is intended to analyze the contributions of Contextual Theology and Contextual theologians to dismantling the South African apartheid system. It is intended to demonstrate that the South African churches failed to effectively politicize and radicalize to confront the government until the advent of Contextual Theology in South Africa. Contextual Theology provided the Christian clergy the theological justification to unite with anti-apartheid organizations. Its very concept of working with the poor and oppressed helped the churches gain favor with the black masses that were mostly Christian. Its borrowing from Marxist philosophy appealed to anti-apartheid organizations. Additionally, Contextual theologians, who were primarily black, began filling prominent leadership roles in their churches and within the ecumenical organizations. They were mainly responsible for radicalizing the churches and the ecumenical organizations. They also filled an important anti-apartheid political leadership vacuum when most political leaders were banned, jailed, or killed.
Show less - Date Issued
- 2012
- Identifier
- CFE0004322, ucf:49484
- Format
- Document (PDF)
- PURL
- http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFE0004322
- Title
- White and Black Womanhoods and Their Representations in 1920s American Advertising.
- Creator
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Turnbull, Lindsey, Lester, Connie, Sacher, John, Dandrow, Edward, University of Central Florida
- Abstract / Description
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The 1920s represented a time of tension in America. Throughout the decade, marginalized groups created competing versions of a proper citizen. African-Americans sought to be included in the national fabric. Racism encouraged solidarity, but black Americans did not agree upon one method for coping with, and hopefully ending, antiblack racism. White women enjoyed new privileges and took on more roles in the public sphere. Reactionary groups like the Ku Klux Klan found these new voices...
Show moreThe 1920s represented a time of tension in America. Throughout the decade, marginalized groups created competing versions of a proper citizen. African-Americans sought to be included in the national fabric. Racism encouraged solidarity, but black Americans did not agree upon one method for coping with, and hopefully ending, antiblack racism. White women enjoyed new privileges and took on more roles in the public sphere. Reactionary groups like the Ku Klux Klan found these new voices unsettling and worrisome and celebrated a white, native-born, Protestant and male vision of the American citizen. Simultaneously, technological innovations allowed for advertising to flourish and spread homogenizing information regarding race, gender, values and consumption across the nation. These advertisements selectively represented these changes by channeling them into pre-existing prescriptive ideology. Mainstream ads, which were created by whites for white audiences, reinforced traditional ideas regarding black men and women and white women's roles. Even if white women were featured using technology or wearing cosmetics, they were still featured in prescribed roles as housekeepers, wives and mothers who deferred to and relied on their husbands. Black women were featured in secondary roles, as servants or mammies, if at all. Concurrently, the black press created its own representations of women. Although these representations were complex and sometimes contradictory and had to reach multiple audiences, black-created ads featured women in a variety of roles, such as entertainers, mothers and business women, but never as mammies. Then, in a decade of increased tensions, white-created ads relied on traditional portrayals of women and African-Americans while black-designed ads offered more positive, although complicated, visions of womanhood.
Show less - Date Issued
- 2012
- Identifier
- CFE0004612, ucf:49939
- Format
- Document (PDF)
- PURL
- http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFE0004612
- Title
- "ANIMAL-LIKE AND DEPRAVED": RACIST STEREOTYPES, COMMERCIAL SEX, AND BLACK WOMEN'S IDENTITY IN NEW ORLEANS, 1825-1917.
- Creator
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Dossie, Porsha, Lester, Connie, University of Central Florida
- Abstract / Description
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My objective with this thesis is to understand how racist stereotypes and myths compounded the sale of fair-skinned black women during and after the slave trade in New Orleans, Louisiana. This commodification of black women's bodies continued well into the twentieth century, notably in New Orleans' vice district of Storyville. Called "quadroons" (a person with 1/4 African ancestry) and "octoroons" (1/8 African ancestry), these women were known for their "sexual prowess" and drew in a large...
Show moreMy objective with this thesis is to understand how racist stereotypes and myths compounded the sale of fair-skinned black women during and after the slave trade in New Orleans, Louisiana. This commodification of black women's bodies continued well into the twentieth century, notably in New Orleans' vice district of Storyville. Called "quadroons" (a person with 1/4 African ancestry) and "octoroons" (1/8 African ancestry), these women were known for their "sexual prowess" and drew in a large number of patrons. The existence of "white passing" black women complicated ideas about race and racial purity in the South. Race as a myth and social construct, or as Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham explains in her essay, African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race, a "metalanguage" exposes race not as a genetic fact, but rather a physical appearance through which power relations and status were to be conferred. My methodology uses race and gender theory to analyze primary and secondary sources to understand and contextualize how population demographics, myths, and liberal 18th century colonial laws contributed to the sale of black women's bodies. The works of Emily Clark, Walter Johnson, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall and other historians who utilize Atlantic history have been paramount in my research. Emily Clark has transformed the "white-black" women from a tragic, sexualized trope into a fully actualized human being, while Hall has tackled the racist underpinnings inherent in the neglect of black women's history. The writings of bell hooks, particularly her essay Eating the Other, establishes the modern day commodification of black women vis-a-vis their representation in media, as well as through the fetishism of their bodies by a white patriarchal system. During slavery plantation owners could do virtually anything they wanted with their property, including engaging in sexual intercourse. By depicting black women as hypersexual jezebels, they could justify their rape, while establishing their dominance and place in the white male hegemony of that time period. For the right price a white male of a lesser class could achieve the same thing at a brothel down in Storyville at the turn of the twentieth century, for as Emily Clark argues in her book, The Strange History of the American Quadroon, these brothels were a great equalizer, allowing all white men to experience "sexual mastery enjoyed only by elite planters before the Civil War." By democratizing white supremacy, the quadroon and others like her forged solidarity that bridge across all classes, while upholding whiteness and oppressing people of color at the same time.
Show less - Date Issued
- 2014
- Identifier
- CFH0004652, ucf:45310
- Format
- Document (PDF)
- PURL
- http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFH0004652
- Title
- The Tragic City: Black Rebellion and the Struggle for Freedom in Miami, 1945-1990.
- Creator
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Dossie, Porsha, Lester, Connie, French, Scot, Walker, Ezekiel, University of Central Florida
- Abstract / Description
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This thesis examines the creation of South Florida's tri-ethnic racial hierarchy during the postwar period, from 1945-1990. This racial hierarchy, coupled with discriminatory housing practices and police violence, created the necessary conditions for Dade County's first deadly uprising in 1968. Following the acquittal of several officers charged in the killing of an unarmed black businessman, a second uprising in 1980 culminated in three days and three nights of violent street warfare between...
Show moreThis thesis examines the creation of South Florida's tri-ethnic racial hierarchy during the postwar period, from 1945-1990. This racial hierarchy, coupled with discriminatory housing practices and police violence, created the necessary conditions for Dade County's first deadly uprising in 1968. Following the acquittal of several officers charged in the killing of an unarmed black businessman, a second uprising in 1980 culminated in three days and three nights of violent street warfare between law enforcement and black residents in Miami's northwest Liberty City neighborhood. The presence of state sanctioned violence at the hands of police in Liberty City set the stage for the city's second uprising. Further, the oftentimes murky and ambiguous racial divide that made people of color both comrades and rivals within Miami's larger power structure resulted in an Anglo-Cuban alliance by the late 1960s and early 1970s that only worsened racial tensions, especially among the city's ethnically diverse, English speaking black population. This thesis project uses a socio-historical framework to investigate how race and immigration, police brutality, and federal housing policy created a climate in which one of Miami's most vulnerable populations resorted to collective violence.
Show less - Date Issued
- 2018
- Identifier
- CFE0007173, ucf:52269
- Format
- Document (PDF)
- PURL
- http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFE0007173