CAUSE Seminars and Speakers Series
Speakers Series 2007-2008
Laurence Glasco
"K. Leroy Irvis and Barack Obama: The Sources of Success"
Friday, 12 October 2007
Refreshments 4:30, Lecture & Discussion 5 - 6:30p.m.
| Location: Baker Hall A53, Steinberg Auditorium
Abstract: The political appeal of Leroy Irvis in the Pennsylvania State Legislature, 1959-1988, transcended the usual divisions of American society—racial, economic, regional, and urban/rural. Chosen Speaker of the House by acclamation, and re-elected multiple times to the post without opposition, Irvis was admired by rural Democrats, suburban Republicans, and urban African Americans. His philosophy and personal traits bear important similarities to those of Barack Obama. As such, they merit scrutiny as a paradigm for the future of interracial politics.
Kimberly Sims
“We Already Have the Italian Squad, Why Not the Colored Squad?”: Race and
Law Enforcement in Early Twentieth Century New York
Friday, 9 November 2007
Refreshments 4:30, Lecture & Discussion 5 - 6:30p.m.
| Location: Baker Hall A53, Steinberg Auditorium
Abstract: Blacks and southern Italian immigrants had comparable, but ultimately divergent experiences with the police reform movement in Progressive era New York City. In response to social-scientific studies and newspaper accounts that depicted both racialized groups as prone to committing particularly violent street crimes, middle-class reformers became alarmed as rapidly increasing numbers of African-American migrants and recent arrivals from the Mezzogiorno flooded into the city. They felt that the corrupt, over-extended, and predominantly Irish-American police force would be no match for these unfamiliar criminals and called for more diversity on the force, echoing the frequent pleas for such inclusion made in African-American and Italian-American newspapers. Police Commissioner William McAdoo created a special plainclothes “Italian Squad” in 1904 charged solely with investigating crimes among Italians, but African-Americans continued to be effectively barred from policing their own neighborhoods until well after World War I. This talk explores the complex reasons behind this divergence and the different ways in which blacks and Italians interacted with the police department during a period of dramatic change in order to investigate how ideas about race, the roots of criminal behavior, and the privileges of whiteness shaped modern policing.
Joseph E. Inikori
"Serving the Cause of Humanity without Hurting the Advance of Global Capitalism: Reflections on the Ending of the Atlantic Slave Trade"
Friday, 8 February
Refreshments 4:30, Lecture & Discussion 5 - 6:30p.m. | Location: TBA
Abstract: That the Transatlantic Slave Trade was a major human tragedy – for those forcefully transported across the Atlantic and for the African societies from which they were seized – is accepted by everyone. In fact, trade in humans has always been regarded as morally reprehensible, as contemporary comments by religious leaders on the medieval slave trade from Western Europe to the Middle East show. Their seventeenth- and eighteenth-century counterparts expressed similar views on the Atlantic slave trade. It was the economic importance of the Atlantic slave trade and African slavery in the Americas to individual entrepreneurs and to regional and national economies that helped to sustain the trade for several centuries, the immense human catastrophe notwithstanding. The ending of the trade was, therefore, a major service to humanity. The lecture examines this important development in the context of the contribution of the Atlantic slave trade to the rise of global capitalism and discusses how the ending of the trade affected its continuing advance.
G. Derek Musgrove
“The Forced Realignment from Above and Below: State Repression of Black Elected Officials and Voters in Alabama, 1981-2000”
Friday, 11 April 2008
Refreshments 4:30, Lecture & Discussion 5 - 6:30p.m.
| Location: TBA
Abstract: This talk explores the role of the repression of black elected officials and voters in the rise of the Republican Party in post-1980 Alabama. Dr. Musgrove posits that in the last quarter century, Alabama Republicans used the machinery of the state to define the Democratic Party as corrupt and black and to reduce black turnout in an attempt to dismember/neutralize a surprisingly resilient post-civil rights era Democratic coalition. Republican Party attempts to repress Alabama blacks can be divided into two different stages. First, during the Reagan/Bush years, national Republicans worked with southern whites – both Democrat and Republican – to divide the black/white New Deal coalition that had made the post-civil rights era southern Democratic Party so resilient. Second, in the 1990s, the initiative passed to state Republicans. Southern Republicans used the offices of governor, secretary of state, and attorney general to carry out the same policies as their predecessors in the Reagan/Bush Justice Departments. Their activities were remarkably successful. By the mid-1990s, the Republican Party was in firm control of Alabama state government.
Speakers Series 2006-2007
Dr.Luther Adams
"Upon This Rock: African American Migration, Urban Renewal and the Struggle for Equality in Louisville, Kentucky"
Friday, 13 April 2007 | Location: Baker Hall A53, Carnegie Mellon University
Abstract: In Harlem there was 125th Street; in Memphis
there was Beale Street; in Louisville Walnut Street was no less vital in
the lives of African Americans. By 1960 Walnut Street stood at the
center of a strong and vibrant, and thoroughly segregated community. In
less than ten years, Our Merciful Saviour and Mammoth Life Insurance
Company would be the only buildings left standing within the Walnut
Street district. The destruction of the Walnut Street business district
was a result of a combination of factors including the integration of
public accommodations, suburbanization, and urban renewal. The city's
efforts to "quarantine blight" amounted to little more than a systematic
process by which blacks were pushed out from downtown. Moreover, urban
renewal led to increased residential segregation within the city. Whites
often responded by "fleeing" to the suburbs of Jefferson County outside
the city. As residential segregation increased, open housing became the
most pressing civil rights concern in the city. Indeed, for blacks in
Louisville, open housing was seen as the solution to "all our problems."
"Upon This Rock," places the heretofore separate histories of
migration, urban renewal and civil rights in the South into a historical
dialogue. In doing so, a far more complex picture of African Americans'
activism emerges.
Dr. Dianne Glave
"Fields, Gardens, and Woods: An Environmental History of Rural African Americans in the Progressive Era South"
Friday, 23 March 2007 | Location: Baker Hall A53, Carnegie Mellon University
Abstract: African Americans have long envisioned the
southern environment in luminous and evocative ways, while remaining
pragmatic and realistic. For rural African Americans in the Progressive
Era South, wilderness was not always defined by a purist preservation
practiced and idealized by whites that emphasized places and not people;
African Americans generally acknowledged and emphasized communities
populating those wild places. In addition, though African Americans
cultivated and desired to own their land, they were often unable to lay
consistent claim to any property including a farm in the South. Their
myriad responses to the environment ranged from a love for nature, to an
ambivalence steeped in fear of nature, to resentment because of a lack
of access to land ownership, to resistance against control by
whites.
Dr. Matthew Countryman
"Up South: A Social Movement Perspective on the Rise of Black Power in the Urban North"
Friday, 2 March
2007 | Location: Singleton Room, Roberts Hall, Carnegie Mellon University
Abstract: Until recently, most scholarship on the civil
rights movement has viewed Black Power as largely an external
ideological influence disrupting the sense of common purpose and goals
within the civil rights movement. This paper draws on Dr. Countryman's
recently-published history of the civil rights and Black Power movements
in Philadelphia as well as other new scholarship on African-American
social movements in the urban North to examine Black Power's emergence
as an organic product of the experience of activists within the
primarily integrationist and nonviolent post-war civil rights movement.
Drawing on Michael Dawson's taxonomy of black political thought, he
argues that Black Power activists turned to the black nationalist
critique of racism's constitutive role in American society as a direct
result of their experience of the limitations of the liberal program for
redressing racial inequality in the U.S. He then traces the development
of Black Power movement strategy and the tension between demands for
community control over public institutions in the black community and
calls for the creation of private black-only institutions. He concludes
the paper with a brief examination of the difficulties faced by Black
Power activists as they sought to sustain movement activism into the
1970s.
Dr. Lansiné Kaba
“Islam in West Africa: Lessons for Today’s World”
Friday, 23 February 2007 | Location: Baker Hall A53, Carnegie Mellon University
Abstract: Dr. Kaba is a professor of history and African-American Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). He received his Ph.D. degree in
history and political science from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Professor Kaba is the author of six books and numerous scholarly
essays. His first book, The Wahhabiyya: Islamic Reform and Politics in French West Africa, 1945-1960, won the Melville Herskovitz Award, given by
the African Studies Association for the best scholarly book on Africa. His latest book in progress is Allahou Akhbar: A West African
Muslim’s Response to Fundamentalism and Violence. Professor Kaba is a former dean of the Honors College at UIC, former president of the
African Studies Association, and presently the Madeleine Haas Russell Distinguished Visiting Professor at Brandeis University.
Dr. Wallace D. Best
"The South and the
City: Migration and Sacred Space in an Urban Black Metropolis"
16 February 2007 | Location: TBA, Carnegie Mellon University
Abstract: The Great Migration generated profound changes
in black American life. The period stretching over most of the twentieth
century when African Americans were, in the words of Richard Wright,
"leaving the land for the streets of the city," forever reshaped the
urban landscape. This mass demographic shift, precipitated by the push
of discrimination and the pull of opportunity, altered the
characterization of black America from rural and southern to urban and
northern. Beyond the "push-pull" factors, however, the most significant
changes in black life were marked in African American religion. No city
demonstrated this transformation more clearly than Chicago, the "Mecca
of the migrant mob." In response to the large influx of black
southerners, many black Chicago churches altered their social programs,
worship services, and preaching styles. When they were not establishing
their own houses of worship, black southern migrants infused existing
congregations with a decidedly southern ethos. Throughout the Great
Migration black Chicago churches of all types proliferated while
congregational memberships reached staggering numbers, and at the
intersections of north and south, rural and urban, past and present,
modern African American religion emerged.
Dr. Cheryl D. Hicks
“She would be better off in the South”: Working-Class Black Women and their Families Response to New York
State's Use of Southern Parole
Friday, 10 November 2006 | Location: Baker Hall A53, Carnegie Mellon University
Abstract: This talk explores the role of race and gender
in assumptions made by New York State prison personnel, working-class
black women, and their family members when black female offenders were
paroled to the South between 1920 and 1935. Despite the racial,
economic, and political oppression evidenced in correspondence from
parolees and their families, administrators continually promoted a
bucolic South ideally suited to reforming black women who had gone
astray in New York. Yet southern cities, where most black women were
paroled, offered as many temptations as New York; moreover, southern
society provided fewer opportunities for economic independence as well
as the supervision and rehabilitation of black women. Thus, the prison
administrators' assumptions that fueled southern parole changed the
reform process as well as the discourse on black women's protection;
moreover, this development signaled the demise of rehabilitation as a
central concern in women's criminal justice.
Dr. Matthew Whitaker
"Race Work: The Rise of Civil Rights in the
Urban West"
Friday, 6 October 2006 | Location: Baker Hall A53, Carnegie Mellon University
Abstract: Nearly sixty years ago, Lincoln and Eleanor
Ragsdale descended upon the isolated, somewhat desolate, and entirely
segregated city of Phoenix, Arizona, in search of freedom and
opportunity--a move that would ultimately transform an entire city and,
arguably, the nation. In this talk, Matthew C. Whitaker tells the story
of two of the most influential black activists of
the post-World War II American West, and through their story, he
supplies a missing chapter in the history of the civil rights movement,
American race relations, African Americans, and the American West.
Whitaker explores the Ragsdales' family history and how their familial
traditions of entrepreneurship, professionalism, activism, and "race
work" helped form their activist identity and placed them in a position
to help desegregate Phoenix. His work is also the first sustained
account of white supremacy and black resistance in Phoenix.
Annual Fall Reception
8 September 2006
Location: Hamburg Hall 1000, Carnegie Mellon University
Speaker | Stephanie Batiste, "Stacks of Obits"
Stephanie L. Batiste's one-woman show,
Stacks of Obits, is a rhythmic performative contemplation of the street
murder of young people of color in Los Angeles. In it she processes the
obituaries of young black people killed with guns in Los Angeles
contained in a young woman's scrapbook. Stacks is an intellectual and
emotional intervention in a flood of unchecked violence. This piece has
been called "breathtaking," "intense," "moving," and "impressive."
Staged readings have been performed at Yale and Stanford Universities
and as part of national and international convenings on violence, ethnic
life-writing, women and performance, hip-hop theater, and urban cultural
studies. The performance uses and takes seriously musical odes to urban
death by rap artists DRS (Dirty Rotten Scoundrels), NWA (Niggas With
Attitude) and Tupac Shakur who have imagined, and found, murder to be
certain future either through victimization or association.
Dr.
Stephanie L. Batiste is Assistant Professor of Literary and Cultural
Studies in Carnegie Mellon University's Department of English. She is
interested in the relationship between power, race and creative
expression and teaches course related to these issues. Dr. Batiste is
also a writer and performers.
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Speakers series 2005-2006
Dr. Alison Isenberg
"The Hollow Prize? Black Buyers, Racial Violence, and the Riot Renaissance"
Friday, 31 March 2006 | Location: Baker Hall A53, Carnegie Mellon Univesity
Abstract: In the 1950s and 1960s, as Main Street businesses struggled to compete with the suburbs, the threat of racial violence came to haunt downtowns across America. In many venues, segregationist resistance turned civil rights lunch counter protests into violent confrontations, and by the mid 1960s looting and burning in commercial districts had become a pattern in cities large and small, north and south. Yet key participants held out the hope that if business sites and transactions could spark such conflict, then urban commercial sites might also be places where race relations could be repaired. These and other events of the 1960s forced Americans to reevaluate the prevailing dogma that the presence of African-Americans or race mixing on Main Street brought property values down. Professor Isenberg reexamined these tumultuous events, and explored the questions they raise about past and present commercial life, race, and urban investment.
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Dr. William P. Jones
"The Tribe of Black Ulysses: African American Lumber Workers in the Jim Crow South"
Friday, 17 February 2006 | Location: Baker Hall A53, Carnegie Mellon University
Abstract: In this talk, Professor Jones describes the vibrant,
working-class communities that African Americans built in and around the sawmill towns and logging camps of the Jim Crow South. Whereas previous scholars have emphasized African American exclusion from or marginalization within the industrial South, Jones finds that black lumber workers were the largest group of southern industrial workers and that such a status allowed them to play a central role in the economic, political and cultural development of the region.
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Dr. Johanna Fernandez
"The Young Lords, The Black Panthers, and the Social and Structural Roots
of Late Sixties Radicalism"
Friday, 18 November 2005 | Adamson Wing, Baker Hall 136A, Carnegie Mellon University
Abstract: This talk examined the rise of the Young Lords Party (YLP), a Puerto Rican revolutionary nationalist group analogous to the Black Panther Party (BPP) that first emerged in Chicago as a reformed gang in 1967. By 1970, YLP branches sprouted in cities from Detroit to Philadelphia, and in New York the Young Lords went from being a little-known organization to the stuff of legend. Like the BPP, these young radicals fixed their attention on the social consequences of the new poverty in American cities: chronic unemployment, the intractable crisis of health care in public hospitals, poor sanitation, drug addiction, hunger, racism, and police brutality. Professor Fernandez concludes that the class, ethnic, and racial issues raised by the YLP not only alter our understanding of late Sixties Radicalism, but also the unprecedented structural and demographic transformation of postwar American cities.
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Speakers series 2004-2005
Dr. Vijay Prashad
"The Pitfalls of Multiculturalism—Anti-Racism and Afro-Asian Interactions"
8 April 2005
Dr. Prashad is an associate professor in the International Studies Department at Trinity College. He is the author of Karma of Brown Folk; Keeping Up with the Dow Joneses: Debt, Prison, Workfare; and Untouchable Freedom: the Social History of a Dalit Community.
Abstract: Multiculturalism grew out of the anti-racist struggles of the 1960s. Unwilling to let go of power, the elite turned multiculturalism from anti-racism into a bureaucratic form of tolerance, even for those who ate high on the hog during Slavery Days and Jim Crow. How do we revive anti-racism in the academy? How do Asian American studies, African American studies, Latino studies, Native American studies, and others negotiate the racial landscape of our current academy? Polyculturalism has some answers.
Dr. William B. Gould IV
"Diary of a Contraband: The Civil War Passage of a Black Sailor"
18 February 2005
Dr. Gould is the Charles A. Beardsley Professor of Law, Emeritus, at Stanford Law School, and the former Director of the National Labor Relations Board during the Clinton administration. He is the author of more than 50 law journal articles and newspaper items, and eight books, including a memoir, Labored Relations: Law, Politics, and the NLRB (2001).
Abstract: In this talk Professor Gould share with us the extraordinary Civil War diary of his great grandfather William B. Gould who escaped from slavery and joined the U.S. Navy. Gould's diary is one of only three such diaries of African American sailors during the Civil War era. Although this book represents an important chapter in the history of the Gould family, it also provides an invaluable window onto the experiences of African Americans, the South, and the nation during the most turbulent moment in U.S. history.
Dr. Thomas A. Guglielmo
"Italian Americans' Relations with African Americans in Interwar Chicago"
29 October 2004
Dr. Guglielmo is an assistant professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame. His book White on Arrival received the Organization of American Historians Frederick Jackson Turner Award for the most outstanding first book published in 2004.
Abstract: In the early part of the twentieth century, Italian immigrants, according to conventional wisdom, held "no particular animosity toward Negroes" and were "less conscious of color distinctions, perhaps because of their traditional familiarity with Carthage and Egypt." By World War II, many Italians openly identified as white and participated actively and visibly in hate strikes and race riots across the urban North. Focusing on interwar Chicago, Guglielmo charted and explained these changes in Italian Americans' relations with African Americans, looking both at large events like the 1919 Race Riot and the Italian-Ethiopian War as well the everyday world of family, friends, work, and leisure.
Dr. Leslie M. Harris
"In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863"
23 September 2004
Dr. Harris is an associate professor of history at Emory University. In addition to her new book, In the Shadow of Slavery, Professor Harris is the author of a recent essay in the Journal of Urban History and book chapters in three edited volumes, including Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History.
Abstract: Many view New York City as one of the economic capitals of colonial and early national America. But only recently have scholars begun to understand the ways in which New York's economic success was intimately connected to the slave trade and slavery. This talk will discuss the history of slavery in New York City; the ways northern slavery differed from southern slavery; and how understanding northern slavery transforms our view of early America.
Speakers series 2003-2004
Dr. Wendell Pritchett
"What's a City For? Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Hood"
2 April 2004
Dr. Pritchett is an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and an expert in legal history and property law.
Abstract: Founded during the late 19th century, Brownsville, a section of eastern Brooklyn, was a predominantly white Jewish working-class community in New York. Brownsville became a kind of mecca for thousands of Americans seeking to move up the socioeconomic ladder, but notorious gangs (dubbed "Murder, Incorporated" by the local press) ruled the streets. During the second wave of the Great Migration during World War II and the 1950s, coupled with the dramatic growth of the Puerto Rican population, Brownsville gained a reputation as a Black and Latino ghetto with one of the highest crime rates in the city. In this engaging book talk, Professor Pritchett illuminated the tale of two cities—one White and the other Black and Latino—during the turbulent late 20th century transition from the industrial to the emerging post-industrial era.
Prof. Carroll Parrott Blue
"History, Memory, Story, and the 21st Century: The Dawn at My Back: Memoir of a Black Texas Upbringing"
27 February 2004
Carroll Parrott Blue is a documentary filmmaker and a professor at San Diego State University. Her films and videos include "Journeys Through the Bloodline," "The Fern Street Circus," "Mystery of the Senses: Vision," "Nigerian Arts-Kindred Spirits." She has also worked as a producer for "Black Is...Black Ain't" and "Eyes on the Prize: Series II"; and a production assistant on "Nine to Five," "On Golden Pond," "Rollover," and the ABC-TV movie of the week, "The Dollmaker."
Abstract: The Dawn At My Back: Memoir of a Black Texas Upbringing is a provocative story about the coming of age of a conflicted mother-daughter relationship. When telescoped through the 20th century, over several continents, and through one hundred years of cultural history, Dawn reveals the impact of America's racism on Houston Texas, its African American community, family, mother, and daughter. Debbie Allen, Ossie Davis, and Ruby Dee are among the voices recreating events in Dawn's DVD-ROM version. This project expands the boundaries of the memoir, the book, the author, the audience and its distribution.
Dr. Albert Camarillo
"Black and Brown in South Central Los Angeles: Perspectives on the 'New' Racial Frontier in American Cities"
30 January 2004
Dr. Camarillo is a professor of American History at Stanford University and director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. He is the author of six books, including Chicanos in California: A History of Mexican Americans.
Abstract: South Central Los Angeles is one of many regions within the major metropolitan areas of the U.S. experiencing profound demographic change, setting in motion a "new racial frontier" of ethnic and race relations, in this case among African Americans and Latinos. The City of Compton, a community at the southern edge of South Los Angeles, provides a window for viewing the contemporary and historical dynamics of ethnic and race relations in a minority-majority municipality. Compton and South Los Angeles also provide a case study for understanding how multiple social and economic problems came to characterize the suburban core area of the nation's second largest city and which, over time, resulted in a fundamentally different social and cultural profile for Los Angeles by the late twentieth century.
Dr. Robyn Spencer
"Black Power and the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California"
21 November 2003
Dr. Spencer was the CAUSE postdoctoral fellow for 2003-2004. She is an assistant professor in the Department of African and African American Studies at Penn State University.
Abstract: The Black Panther Party, founded in 1966 in Oakland, California, by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale grew to become one of the leading organizations of the Black Power movement. Notorious for its bold style, flamboyant rhetoric and initial advocacy of armed self defense in the 1960s and today, the Black Panther Party is less well known as a mass movement of politicized urban youth that launched a powerful ideological challenge to American racism, capitalism, and imperialism with few resources, or precedents. This talk will detail the Panthers' evolution in Oakland, California, paying particular attention to how this history challenges accepted notions about the chronology, geography, parameters, and constituency of Black Power in the scholarly literature.
Dr. Barbara Ransby
"Ella Baker's Legacy: Remembering the Black Radical Democratic Tradition"
19 September 2003
Dr. Ransby is an associate professor from the Departments of African-American Studies and History at the University of Illinois-Chicago and the executive director of The Public Square.
Abstract: Ella Baker (1903-1986) was an activist whose remarkable career spanned fifty years and touched thousands of lives. She was one of the most important African American leaders of the twentieth century and perhaps the most influential woman in the civil rights movement. Baker made a place for herself in predominantly male political circles that included W. E. B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, and Martin Luther King Jr., all the while maintaining relationships with a vibrant group of women, students, and activists both black and white. Baker was a complex figure whose radical, democratic worldview, commitment to empowering the black poor, and emphasis on group-centered, grassroots leadership set her apart from most of her political contemporaries.
Speakers series 2002-2003
Dr. T. K. Hunter
"Imagined Geographies of Liberty: 1772 London, 1836 Boston"
31 March 2003
Abstract: The talk drew parallels between the free English soil doctrine in a 1772 English court case and an 1836 American case, both of which (like the much later Dred Scott case) involved enslaved people claiming legal freedom. In both, physical locale determined access to particular constructions of liberty, in times when more than one ideology competed to define freedom. The topic explores the intersections of law, liberty, memory/imagination and geographies of power.
Dr. Lisa Levenstein
"Tired of Being Seconds: Black Women Welfare Recipients and the Struggle Against Poverty in Post-World War II Philadephia"
28 February 2003
Dr. Levenstein was the CAUSE postdoctoral fellow for 2002-2003. She is an assistant professor in the History Department of the University of North Carolina - Greensboro.
Abstract: In the years after World War II, in Northern cities such as Philadelphia that had large impoverished African American communities, black women came to comprise the majority of recipients of welfare. African American women turned to welfare because of their inability to secure gainful employment and their need to raise their children, care for their health, and to avoid getting involved in abusive relationships with men. Yet their lives on welfare involved constant struggle because the program only provided meager amounts of money, restricted them from acquiring additional material goods, invaded their privacy, stigmatized them, and impeded their abilities to sustain relationships with men. Welfare recipients' attempts to provide for their children and maintain their dignity while receiving public assistance reveal the tremendous amount of labor it took just to survive on welfare and illustrate the creativity and persistence poor black women exhibited in their attempts to secure better lives for their families.
Dr. Dylan C. Penningroth
"Taking Kin to Court: Family and Property in the Freedmen's Courts"
24 January 2003
Dr. Penningroth was a visiting assistant professor in the Department of History at Northwestern University and associate professor at the University of Virginia.
Abstract: For millions of African Americans, the end of slavery marked a new beginning for family life. It opened new opportunities to reestablish families and accumulate property. Along with opportunity, however, came difficult questions about kinship. What was a family? Who belonged in it? And what claims and obligations did family membership carry? This paper looks at military court cases and other documents from the 1860s and 1870s to examine negotiations within black communities over property and family.
Dr. Winston C. McDowell
"Open and Hidden Handicaps: Albon L. Holsey, the National Colored Merchants' Association, and the Redefinition of Depression-Era Harlem"
15 November 2002
Dr. McDowell is a research consultant at Rainbow Research, Inc. in Minneapolis. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.
Abstract: In 1931, Albon L. Holsey, Tuskegee Institute official and Secretary of the National Negro Business League, announced through a press release the formation of "the most ambitious and far-reaching organization" begun by black Americans: the National Colored Merchants' Association Stores, Incorporated (NCMA). Based in New York City, the NCMA set out to spur African American business growth and job creation, and ultimately, African American empowerment, through the eventual establishment of black-owned grocery cooperatives in black urban communities nationwide. Yet, the organization's initial failed effort in its own "backyard," New York City, and in particular, Black Harlem, and its demise in general, revealed limitations to race business promotion. Furthermore, the fate of the NCMA in Harlem reflected shifts in African American self-definition and racial activism exacerbated by the Great Depression.
Dr. Robyn C. Spencer
"Comrade Sister: Black Women in the Black Panther Party in Oakland, CA, 1966-1982"
22 November 2002
Dr. Spencer is an assistant professor of African and African American Studies and History at Penn State University.
Abstract: This paper explores gender politics in the Black Panther Party. It centers the voices and experiences of rank and file Panther women to complicate the traditional narrative of sexist oppression that has come to define Black women's experiences in Black Power formations. It argues that the Panthers attempted to provide an alternative space where black men and women could challenge sexism and patriarchy, as well as reconceptualize gender roles. The Panthers grappled with the theory and practice of sexual freedom within the organization and officially took a stand against male chauvinism, gender based division of labor, and physical abuse of women. Politically conscious men and women transformed the Panthers internal gender politics, and by extension, the organization's overall political agenda. In the 1970s, when women rose to key leadership positions in the organization, the Panthers took issues that were traditionally defined in gendered terms, such as child rearing, birth control, and housework, and made them into organizational issues. By analyzing how black women carved out space for themselves in black nationalist formations, this paper argues that the sharp line of division that is often drawn between Black Power and women's liberation was far more permeable that the historiography of this period suggests.
Second Ford Foundation-Sponsored Seminar and Speakers Series (2000-2002)
This series, "African Americans in the Postindustrial City," aimed to enhance the institutionalization of black urban studies in the academy and influence research, teaching, and popular understanding of the subject. In conjunction with the seminar, we hosted an urban studies conference, featuring six major speakers, experts on African American life in post-World War II cities. We also used this conference as a vehicle for bringing Midwest Consortium members together.
Race, Gender, and Class Speakers Series | 1999-2000
Co-sponsored by the university's Alcoa African American Speakers program, this series showcased interdisciplinary research on African American women, culture, and identity formation. Presenters included Mia Bay, Rutgers University, Department of History (co-sponsored by the Mentalities Seminar, Pittsburgh Center for Social History); Farah Jasmine Griffin, University of Pennsylvania, English Department; and Evelyn Hammonds, MIT, Program in Science, Technology, and Society. Other presenters were Dana Frank, University of California, Santa Cruz, American Studies; and Columbia University historian Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Yo' Mama's Disfunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (1998). CAUSE co-sponsored Kelley's talk with the University of Pittsburgh's annual E. P. Thompson lecture series on labor and working class history.
First Ford Foundation-Sponsored Seminar and Speakers Series | 1997-1998
As part of the Midwest Consortium for Black Studies (MCBS), representing the second of two graduate seminars and public lecture series, this first seminar, under Professor Stanlie James at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, focused on black women's studies, history, and social policy.
Our seminar and lecture series focused on "African American Urban Studies: History, Work, and Social Policy."
During the first semester, public lecturers and seminar presenters were (in order of appearance) James Oliver Horton, Ronald Lewis, Brenda Stevenson, and Tera Hunter. Second semester guests were Richard Walter Thomas, Quintard Taylor, Alice O'Connor, James Johnson, and William Darity. The public lecture not only attracted members of the larger university community and the Pittsburgh region, but helped to lay the groundwork for a wrap-up conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan titled "Black Agenda for the 21st Century: Toward a Synthesis of Culture, History, and Social Policy," in the spring of 1999.
Perspectives on Pittsburgh Seminar Series | Spring 1997
This series, funded by the Maurice Falk Fund, explored the historical development of the black community during its industrial phase; its transformation during the recent era of deindustrialization; and its struggle with inequality in the present. By bringing together scholars, students, policy makers, and practitioners, this seminar showcased the Center as a resource for broadening our understanding of the relationship between our past and present. It also strengthened links between the university and the African American community.
African American Junior Scholars Speaker Series | 1996-1999
Highlighting the work of promising young minority scholars, the African American Junior Scholars Speaker Series was a collaborative effort between CAUSE and the Department of History. This series was also conceived as part of the department's ongoing commitment to add minority scholars to its faculty. The series featured nearly a half dozen young scholars.