African-American History
(Chicago Citation)

Robert Purvis was an important member of the abolitionist community in the United States during the mid-1800's. Originally from South Carolina, Purvis was only 1/4 black, and although he was light skinned enough to pass for white, chose to present himself as a black man. Purvis was important for his association with a number of abolitionist causes including the founding of the American Anti-Slavery Society, Young Men's Antislavery Society, and the American Moral Reform Society (AMRS), Philadelphia Vigilance Committee. (Alexander 506) He wrote "Appeal of Forty Thousand Citizens to Protest Disenfranchisement in Pennsylvania," used his home as a stop on the Underground Railroad, and support black troops during the Civil ar.

John esley Cromwell was born into slavery but went on to become a lawyer, organizer, historian, educator, and writer. Freed in 1851 when his father purchased his family's freedom, John returned to Virginia after the Civil ar to…...

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Works Cited

Alexander, Leslie, and Walter Rucker. Encyclopedia of African-American History, Vol. 1.

(Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, LLC, 2010), 506.

Alex-Assensoh, Yvette, and Lawrence Hanks. Black and Multiracial Politics in America.

(New York: New York University Press, 2000), 338.

Nevertheless, when a specific law was disgustingly unfair, that unfair law itself placed a threat on the society's reverence for law in general. In case the unfair law was not possible to be changed by way of regular legal channels, intentional breaching of that particular law may be defensible. Since the person committing civil disobedience had utmost regard for the value of law, he would breach the unfair law in gay abandon, and he would eagerly acknowledge the outcomes for infringing it. He will get involved in breaching the law and admit its punishment as a vehicle of drawing the interest of the community to the dissipation of that particular law. (the Civil ights Movement: The Immigrant Heritage of America) King also stressed how significant it was that the civil rights campaign did not percolate to the stage of racists and hate mongers they struggled against. The ideology of…...

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References

Austin, Curtis J. On Violence and Nonviolence: The Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi. Retrieved at Accessed on 20 May, 2005http://mshistory.k12.ms.us/features/feature24/ms_civil_rights.html.

Coombs, Norman. The Civil Rights Movement. The Immigrant Heritage of America. Twayne Press. 1972. Retrieved at   Accessed on 20 May, 2005http://www.csusm.edu/Black_Excellence/documents/pg-c-r-movement.html .

Heroes of the Civil Rights Movement. Retrieved at   Accessed on 20 May, 2005http://www.infoplease.com/spot/bhmheroes1.html .

Kennedy, Randall. Martin Luther King's Constitution: a Legal History of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Yale Law Journal; April, 1989. No: 98; pp: 999-1067. Retrieved at   Accessed on 20 May, 2005http://academic.udayton.edu/race/02rights/civilrights03.htm .

Board of Education case of 1954. There is no case in education board's history that has played a more important role or has served as a bigger judicial turning point than this case. In the history of important cases, Brown vs. Board of Education occupies a top slot because of its impact not only on education system in the country but on the fate of African-Americans in United States. It just changed the way Americans handled issue of human rights.
In 1950s, racial segregation in schools was a norm. While schools were required to be equal in quality of education, they were also meant to be separate. It was found that even equality principle was not followed in spirit since most black schools offered education which inferior in quality. In 1849, a similar case oberts vs. City of Boston surfaced to challenge the education system of racial segregation but nothing…...

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References

1] Dr. Howard O. Lindsey, "A History of Black America," pg. 34-35

2] Edward W. Knappman, ed., Great American Trials (Detroit: Visible Ink, 1994) 467.

3] Knappman 467.

4] Benjamin Munn Ziegler, ed., Desegregation and the Supreme Court (Boston: D.C. Heath and Company, 1958) 78-79

Generations of Bondage
please note I have provided references so that you may include them if you wish

The book upon which this review is written is a fantastic, true story of the African-American family that shows how it survived through some of American history's most detestable and hypocritical times. This essay will attempt to answer the specific questions associated with the book review, for didactical purposes, but will strive to also provide an overview sprinkled with some intimate details into the family's journey from slavery to the 21st century.

To begin, the Lewis-Green family history includes specific characters that portray the strength of the Black Family. These are found in every person, but most notably comprise Violet, Syntha, Kitty and Tom. Violet, with whom the book begins, arrives in America in the 18th century, and is considered "freeborn." Due to the times' circumstances, Violet has the ability to sue for freedom,…...

Franklin & Higgenbotham (2011) provide an Afro-centric view of history, albeit one that focuses on how Africa evolved vis-a-vis Europe and especially with regards to the slave trade. Salient points F&H point out include the diversity, richness, and complexity of African societies and their relationships with one another as well as with outside traders from Europe and the Middle East. Social stratification, hierarchy, and patriarchy all characterized the most powerful and important African societies. The slave trade, both trans-Atlantic and across the Mediterranean, transformed both African societies and European ones as well. The F&H book offers insight into how the systematic exploitation of disenfranchised individuals creates wealth for capitalists, but the book is not focused on slavery or economics. Rather, From Slavery to Freedom talks about how people of African decent, in the diaspora and on the continent, have made tremendous but often unheralded contributions to the arts, the sciences,…...

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References

Franklin, J.H. & Higgenbotham, E.B. (2011). From Slavery to Freedom. McGraw-Hill.

Giddings, G.J. (n.d.). Afrocentric Jay-Z.

Outstanding Black Americans Change Racial Viewpoints
One of the first black spokespersons ever to come into the living rooms of millions of white Americans was Oprah Winfrey. Prior to that black Americans excelled in sports. They might have seen Mohammad Ali in a boxing match. Black Americans were gaining recognition in politics. Of course, there was the memory of Martin Luther King. The flamboyant Jesse Jackson was often on news programs. Oprah Winfrey was the one black person who not only gained entry into millions of living rooms but also was welcomed warmly. For years Black Americans gained recognition for their ability in baseball, basketball, football and tennis. But it was Oprah who changed the viewpoints of millions of Americans who identified with the compassionate woman. She not only became a household name, but a woman whom viewers held in high esteem regardless of their race. Her political agenda transcended party…...

Moving Towards the American Dream: The Story of Robert Joseph Pershing Foster
“I was taking a part of the South to transplant in alien soil, to see if it could grow differently, if it could drink of new and cool rains, bend in strange winds, respond to the warmth of other suns, and, perhaps, to bloom” is the Richard Wright passage from where Isabel Wilkerson derives the title of her 2010 ethnography The Warmth of Other Suns. Wilkerson interviewed more than 1000 people for her research, before whittling those numbers down and selecting three individuals who she believed captured the diversity of experiences shaping the Great Migration (“Great Migration: The African-American Exodus North”). Three people cannot necessarily stand in for the six million African Americans who moved from the South between 1915 and 1970; as Lepore puts it, “Can three people explain six million?” (Lepore 1). The answer might actually be…...

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Works Cited

Franklin, J.H. and E. Higginbotham. From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans, 9 th ed. NY: McGraw Hill, 2011. 

“Great Migration: The African-American Exodus North.” NPR. 13 Sept, 2010.

Lepore, Jill. “The Uprooted.” The New Yorker. 6 Sept, 2010. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/09/06/the-uprooted

Wilkerson, Isabel. The Warmth of Other Suns. First Vintage, 2010.

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129827444

African-Americans History And Culture
The false and misleading notion that "African-Americans created themselves" completely ignores and invalidates the rich history of those whose ancestry lies in the great African continent. While African-Americans have adopted and incorporated many cultures into their own (not unlike any other cultural group in America) that in no way signifies that African-American's have no culture or history of their own.

"Black people have no history, no heroes, no great moments," this was told to a young Arthur Schomburg by his 5th grade teacher. Schomburg, with both African and Puerto ican ancestry went on to become a great historian and curator of African-American history; helping to dispel the very "truth" that his teacher tried to feed him about his own history and culture many years prior. The statement that "African-Americans created themselves" simply means that the Black American is devoid of history and a culture to call his own.…...

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References

Bascom, L.C. (1999). A renaissance in Harlem: Lost voices of an American community. New York, NY: Bard.

Painter, N.I. (2006). Creating Black Americans: African-American history and its meanings, 1619 to the present. London: Oxford University Press.

Derek's racist beliefs are cemented, and became the springboard to his activism and leadership of the skinheads when his father is killed by a black man, fighting a fire in a crack house in an inner-city neighborhood. hen two young African-Americans try to steal his car, Derek is determined that he, unlike his beloved father, will emerge the winner. The film makes it clear that Derek has been waiting for this to happen. Again, the film does not excuse the theft of his vehicle, but indicates that the world is filled with potential justifications for racism, and Derek is looking for such 'reasons' to engage in hateful action. Derek is both a product of his environment and his simmering male adolescent rage.

Derek sent to prison for three years. His younger brother tries to assume Derek's role by harassing immigrants and other non-whites. He also finds himself, like Derek, of being…...

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Work Cited

American History X. Directed by Tony Kaye. 1998.

African-American Perspectives on Education for African-Americans
Education has been an issue at the forefront of the African-American community since the first Africans were brought to the colonies hundreds of years ago. For centuries, education was forbidden to enslaved Africans in the United States with penalties such as whipping and lynching for demonstrating such skills as literacy. As the abolitionist movement gained strength and the Civil War commenced, more and more enslaved Africans saw education as a sign of freedom and a representation of the many ways in which they were held back yet simultaneously integral to American culture. Two African-American writers, scholars, and leaders, W.E.B. Du Bois and Frederick Douglass, discuss the power and the potential for education in the African-American Community. Douglass wrote his seminal work, his autobiography, in the middle of the 19th century, before the Civil War, econstruction, the industrial revolution, and the turn of the 20th…...

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References:

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. 1845. Available from 2012 May 05.http://www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/f-douglas/Narrative-Douglass.pdf.

Du Bois, W.E.B. "Of Our Spiritual Strivings." The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. Available from   2012 May 05.http://www.bartleby.com/114/1.html .

Rowley, Stephanie J., Sellers, Robert M., Chavous, Tabbye M., & Smith, Mia A. "The Relationship Between Racial Identity and Self-Esteem in African-American College and High School Students." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 74, No. 3., 715 -- 724, 1998.

Sellers, Robert M., Chavous, Tabbye M., & Cooke, Deanna Y. "Racial Ideology and Racial Centrality as Predictors of African-American College Students' Academic Performance." Journal of Black Psychology, Vol. 24, No. 1, 8 -- 27, 1998.

Economic, Political, and Social History African American culture arose out of the turmoil and despair of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. From West African port towns to plantations, African American culture is unique in that it was forged under the pressure of bondage. People with different cultures and languages formed new identities relative to their subordinate social, economic, and political status—their culture therefore being in part defined by the experience of oppression and the determination to overcome it. Bereft of social, political, or economic independence for centuries, African American culture nevertheless emerged as organically as any other, but flourished especially after emancipation.
Yet the economic history of African American culture cannot be divorced from the human capital model of slavery. The Emancipation Proclamation laid the first foundation stones for African American economic, political, and social empowerment but Reconstruction failed to fulfill the objective of genuine liberation (DuBois, 1994). African Americans in free states…...

American history [...] changes that have occurred in African-American history over time between 1865 to the present. African-Americans initially came to this country against their will. They were imported to work as slaves primarily in the Southern United States, and they have evolved to become a force of change and growth in this country. African-Americans have faced numerous challenges throughout their history in this country, and they still face challenges today.
After the Civil War ended in 1865, African-Americans were freed from slavery. However, that did not end their struggle for freedom. In fact, in many ways, it only made their situation worse. Many slaves who were in fairly decent situations were thrust out to fend for themselves, or they became sharecroppers for their former masters, barely making enough money to stay alive. This was the time of "reconstruction" in the South, and it was recovering both politically and economically…...

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References

Adeboyejo, B. (2005, May/June). Q & A: Curating African-American history for the nation. The Crisis, 112, 7.

Dagbovie, P.G. (2006). Strategies for teaching African-American history: Musings from the past, ruminations for the future. The Journal of Negro Education, 75(4), 635+.

Editors. (2010). African-American history timeline. Retrieved 15 Nov. 2010 from the Peterson Education Web site:  http://www.infoplease.com/spot/bhmtimeline.html .

Editors (2008). African-American odyssey. Retrieved 15 Nov. 2010 from the Library of Congress Web site:  http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/aaohtml/exhibit/aopart7.html .

At the same time, however, the ghettoes resulted from the people's desire to form a united community to which they could relate and that could offer comfort from a society that, despite its more opened views, still viewed blacks from the point-of-view of the segregation policy.
The ghettoes however represented an environment that would later offer one of the most important and relevant elements of the American culture: the music and religious atmosphere that was traditional for the black community. As a means of resisting the struggle against segregation and inequality, many communities saw music as the connection that united all black people in their suffering. The soul music thus became a means of expressing both sorrow and joy, hope and despair among the black communities. Even though such practices had been seen in the South as well, once the Great Migration started, the black people exported their core values…...

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Bibliography

African-American World. The Great Migration. Educational Broadcasting Corporation. 2002. 28 April 2007  http://www.pbs.org/wnet/aaworld/reference/articles/great_migration.html 

Crew, Spencer R. "The Great Migration of Afro-Americans, 1915-40." Monthly Labor Review,

Encyclopedia Britannica, Jim Crow law, 2007. 28 April 2007  http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9043641/Jim-Crow-law/ 

Grossman, James. "Great Migration." The Electronic Encyclopedia of Chicago. 2004. 28 April 2007  http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/545.html

The 1950s was a time when the last of the generation of slaves were beginning to disappear from communities but their first generation children were attempting to make sense of the lives they led and the cautionary tales they had applied to their lives as a result. The work shows that for the 1950s African-American family it was a time of remembrance and resolution as well as a time to reflect on change and hope for even greater change in the future, with the inclusion of the fact that defacto segregation and suppression was still occurring in a rampant manner all over their lives.
Secondary Sources

Jewell, K. Sue. 2003. Survival of the African-American Family: The Institutional Impact of U.S. Social Policy. Westport, CT: Praeger.

Jewell develops a social history that demonstrates all the many disparities of the African-American vs. majority culture and how these disparities, legal, social and economic effected the…...

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McLoyd's work brings to mind the manner in which the 1950s conservative slant echoed the discrimination of the past and present. The work demonstrates that during the 1950s academic work began to be even more direct with its assassination of the individual as the source of limited progress. In other words the period demonstrates an extreme prejudice, where African-American Families themselves were in short blamed directly for their inability to succeed in the American landscape, regardless of the fact that the social, legal and economic conditions were almost completely against them.

Itagaki, Lynn M. 2003. Transgressing Race and Community in Chester Himes's if He Hollers Let Him Go. African-American Review 37, no. 1: 65.

Itagaki's work is a literary and social criticism of the works of Chester Himes, an African-American man who moved his family to Los Angels in the late 1940s and through the 1950s and 60s experienced contradictions in the ideal and the actions of those living there. The white community rejected and repressed the African-American family with all the same and worse segregation and discrimination when they were attempting to grow and become stronger, many by leaving the south. The work describes the volume of Himes' works but looks most closely at his beloved novel if He Hollers Let Him Go. The message of the work is distinctly responsive to the 1950s as a period of social transition for the African-American families, as they are told one thing and treated in a manner altogether different.

African-Americans are second only to Native Americans, historically, in terms of poor treatment at the hands of mainstream American society. Although African-Americans living today enjoy nominal equality, the social context in which blacks interact with the rest of society is still one that tangibly differentiates them from the rest of America. This cultural bias towards blacks is in many notable ways more apparent than the treatment of other people of color, such as Asian immigrants, as is reflected in disparate wages and living conditions experienced by these respective groups. Common stereotypes hold the successful, college educated black man or woman as the exception rather than the rule, whereas Asians are commonly thought of as over-achievers. Although any bias undermines social interaction in that it shifts attention away from individual merit, the bias towards African-Americans can be said to be worse than most, and lies at the root of discrimination and…...

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Bibliography

Tamar Lewin. Growing Up, Growing Apart. New York Times, June 25, 2000.  http://query.nytimes.com/search/article-page.html?res=9402E1DF1730F936A15755C0A9669C8B63 

Thomas Dolan. Newark and its Gateway Complex. Rutgers Newark Online, September, 2002. http://www.newarkmetro.rutgers.edu/reports/2002/09/gateway/gateway2.php

George Breitman (Ed.), Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements, published in 1990 by Grove Weidenfeld: New York, NY. pp 4-17 http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/malcolmxgrassroots.htm

High Rises Brought Low at Last. The Economist: July 9, 1998.  http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=142018

I. Introduction
A. Thesis statement: Zora Neale Hurston was a pioneering literary figure whose works defied conventional representations of race, gender, and sexuality in the early 20th century.
B. Hurston's biographical background and literary context

II. Breaking Boundaries in Race and Gender
A. Challenging stereotypes in "Their Eyes Were Watching God": Janie Crawford's journey toward self-discovery and autonomy
B. Exploring the nuances of black womanhood in "The Gilded Six-Bits" and "Sweat": Depictions of love, violence, and resilience

III. Embracing the African Diaspora
A. Preserving cultural traditions in "Mules and Men" and "Tell My Horse": Folklore, music, and storytelling as expressions of black identity
B. Celebrating Haitian Vodou in....

The educational philosophies of Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Carter G. Woodson all aimed to uplift African Americans through education, but each man had a unique approach. This essay will compare and contrast the effectiveness of their educational philosophies in promoting social and economic advancement for African Americans. Booker T. Washington believed in vocational education and economic self-sufficiency for African Americans. His philosophy emphasized practical skills and training for jobs that were in demand, such as agriculture and trades. Washington's Tuskegee Institute in Alabama was a model for his educational philosophy, teaching students skills that would enable them to....

I. Introduction

1. Definition of a More Perfect Union
   
   

   1. A state of unity and harmony
   
   
   2. A society where all citizens are treated equally and fairly

2. Historical Context
   
   

   1. The Preamble to the U.S. Constitution
   
   
   2. The Civil War
   
   
   3. The Civil Rights Movement

II. Body

1. Benefits to Individuals
   
   

   1. Greater opportunities for success
   
   
   2. Increased sense of belonging and community
   
   
   3. Improved quality of life

2. Benefits to Society
   
   
   ....

1. Through centuries of oppression and discrimination, African Americans have persevered with unwavering determination to fight for their rights and equality in society.

2. From the chains of slavery to the bars of segregation, African Americans have continually defied the odds and risen above adversity to pave the way for a more inclusive and just society.

3. Despite facing systemic barriers and institutionalized racism, African Americans have valiantly challenged the status quo and advocated for change through peaceful protests, legal battles, and cultural movements.

4. The resilience and strength of the African American community have been exemplified in their tireless....