People
John Brown
-led assault on Harpers Ferry to end slavery with armed warfare
-Brown became a martyr for the cause of immediate abolition. However, the story of John Brown also represents the ways in which white people have been put at the center of the story of the abolition of slavery.
San Francisco State University
The San Fran State Uni strike established one of the first African American studies departments in the country.
experience at SFSU represents the challenges faced by students who wanted African American studies and the centrality of students to the history of Afam
partus sequitur ventrum
decreed that the legal status of enslaved women’s children would follow their mother. So, if your mother had been enslaved, you would be as well.
secured racialized slavery through its heritability
The Haitian Revolution was a series of battles between 1791 and 1804 between enslaved Haitians, colonists, the armies of the British and French colonizers, and a number of other parties. Through the struggle, the Haitian people ultimately won independence from France and thereby became the first country to be founded by former slaves
The Haitian Revolution represents the two main ways that African American Studies engages with history. On the one hand, in African American Studies we write the history of the African Diaspora and describe events like the Haitian Revolution. But we also critique, how these events are described. While many scholars have written about the Haitian Revolution, a Black Studies approach critiques historians who try to downplay the impact of the Revolution and recognizes the brilliance of the Revolution and its place in the Age of Revolutions.
African American Studies
a scholarly inter/discipline that studies the African diaspora and analyzes race. Begins with intellectual history of afam and institutionalized with Black Power/Black Campus Movement
Carter G Woodson
part of the first generation of Black PhDs. Considered the “father of Black History”
a crucial part of the intellectual history of African American studies, the first phase of its development
Diaspora
-voluntary and involuntary dispersion of African People around the world
-understanding diaspora allows us to analyze whole black world
chattel slavery
practice of inherited racialized slavery
The inherited and race based nature of enslaved people’s status in early America distinguishes chattel slavery from other systems of slavery throughout human history.
Black Campus Movement
Scholars call the Black Power influenced movement on U.S. college campuses that led to the founding of African American Studies the Black Campus Movement. Started at HBCUs
BCM led to the institutionalization of Black Studies and transformed higher education
Lift Every Voice and Sing
The black national anthem written by James Weldon Johnson
Lift Ev’ry Voice and sing is an example of how Black intellectuals have used art to explore the meaning of the Black experience in the United States and to teach people across racial lines about race in America. It is also an example of how art is a part of Afam scholarship
Sara Baartman
African woman put on display by Europeans to reinforce the ideology of race. Even in death, her body was used to advance race science.
example of how ideology of race is reproduced
Sao Tome
Sao Tome was the first place where the development of sugar growing that prefigured what it would look like later. The first really big sugar plantation in the Caribbean. 1500s.
Sets the model for the sugar plantation and The portuguese’s plantations on Sao Tome allowed the sugar plantation complex to expand, and that expansion requires more labor and therefore grows the slave trade.
General Strike
Dubois insisted that enslaved people ought to understood as workers. As Wake Forest historian Guy Emerson Mount writes, “As workers, slaves constantly struggled with their masters not only over their working conditions but over their legal and social status as well. The end game for any slave insurgency was not just to own the means of production but to own one’s very self. Enslaved people freed themselves by running away aka going on strike.
the general strike forced the hand of President Lincoln while turning a war to save the Union into a war to end slavery. Turned a war about the interests of white people into one about ending slavery.
Civil Rights Liberalism
Civil Rights Liberals advocated for the full inclusion of Black people into American citizenship
legal strategy, non violent direct action and integration
sit ins and mass mobilizations
Metalanguage of Race
race does not just shape its own meaning or how we understand what race is, it also colors the meaning of terms that on the surface have nothing to do with race.
Understanding race is a metalanguage allows us to demystify U.S. history
Bayard Rustin
key figure in civil rights liberalism, advisor to MLK Jr. and planned the march on Washington
Rustin is an example of the diversity of civil rights movement organizers, but also how gender and sexuality shaped who got to be considered a leader
Wilmington Massacre
in North Carolina, Black republicans and working class white men banded together to address the need for both class and racial equality. This coalition of Black and working class white politicians was called “Fusion” politics. White politicians in the state would not let this stand – it threatened them as elites and as white men trying to maintain power in the state. White men conspired to strip black men of the right to vote in NC in 1898
part of campaign of white violence to end reconstruction. Stripped black men of the right to vote
Black Studies Habit of Mind
Intersectionality, Non Linear Thinking, Diasporic perspective, Oppression and Resistance, and Solidarity
represents the unique approach to knowledge of Afam beyond just the study of black people
Orangeburg Massacre
South Carolina State in Orangeburg was one of the important HBCU pioneers in the Black Campus Movement. “Students at Orangeburg had been engaged in protests against a city bowling alley and other public facilities that were still refusing service to African Americans four years after passage of the Civil Rights Act. Protesting students were murdered by police. 1968.
Orangeburg kicked off the BCM at campuses across the country
How does the image of the Black Panther demonstrate the relationship between the civil rights and Black power movement?
-origins of the image with the Lowndes County Freedom Organization and its affiliation with SNCC or group centered organizing
-black panthers asked to use the image
-shows that there wasn’t a binary between black power and civil rights
Ella Baker
-mentored many civil rights movement leaders
-was in SNCC, NAACP, and SCLC at different points of her career
-group centered leadership
Manchester Pan-African Congress
Meeting in London in 1945 that solidified the modern Pan-Africanist political movement and by many is considered its zenith
The Congress paved the way for the independence movements of African nations in the Wake of WWII.
ideology
ideology is the vocabulary or lens people use to make sense of their everyday reality. Is historically produced.
race is historically produced not a “social construct” in a vacuum. If repetition of ideology can be challenged, we can disrupt ideology of race
Group Centered Organizing Tradition
sustainable social movements came about when there were many leaders, or what we call, “group centered leadership” rather than charismatic leadership.
Strategy: Long term organizing
Tactic: non violent direct action as tactic, not way of life
How does Toni Morrison’s short story Recitatif demonstrate the importance of understanding that race is a metalanguage?
-Morrison uses the metalanguage of race to make an argument about what’s missed when readers are taken in by racial codes
-if we understand race is a metalanguage we see the story is about Maggie and what happened to her