Black New England: Building on the Work of Lorenzo Johnston Greene

With the death this spring of Dr. Lorenzo J. Greene, Professor Emeritus of History at Lincoln University (Missouri), historians of blacks in New England have lost one of their pioneers, a man who continued to support the scholarly study of Afro-Americans in the region throughout his life. Dr. Greene, who was 89 at his death, was best known as the author of The Negro in Colonial New England, 1620-1776 (1942). Benjamin Quarles wrote of the book, “To it we are indebted for three things, if not more—for filling a gap in the literature of American colonial history, for portraying a hither to neglected aspect of the Negro’s role in our country’s past and, finally, for presenting us with as fine an exhibition of the historian’s craft as one could wish.” Dr. Greene served for nearly half a century on the faculty of Lincoln, one of the nation’s historically black colleges, and while in Missouri was in the vanguard of that state’s civil rights movement. While much of Dr. Greene’s scholarship in later years was centered on blacks in Missouri and in the nation as a whole, he continued to interest himself in New England blacks. He was actively involved in the work of the Parting Ways Museum of Afro-American Ethnohistory, based in Plymouth, Massachusetts, over the course of the early l980s, and this work has helped to forge better understanding of black culture in southeastern Massachusetts

Miscegenation and Acculturation in the Narragansett Country of Rhode Island, 1710-1790

The histories of most New England states view blacks as a strange, foreign people enslaved in southern states, whom New Englanders rescued first by forming colonization and abolitionist societies and later by fighting a Civil War to free them. The existence of a black population in New England as early as the seventeenth century has been pretty much ignored. Indeed Anderson and Marten, of the Parting Ways Museum of Afro-American Ethnohistory, touched off a furor with their discovery that Abraham Pearse, one of the early residents of Plymouth Colony, was black. The long neglect of New England’s black history has recently come to an end. Historical societies in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island have been formed to facilitate the study of black life in the colonial era as well as in later periods. A number of these organizations—notably the African Meeting House Museum, the Parting Ways Museum of Afro-American Ethnohistory, and the Rhode Island Black Heritage Society—have won national awards and acclaim. The scholarly literature now reflects this new interest in New England blacks. Carvalho’s Black Families in Hampden Country, 1650-1855, while not strictly speaking a history, provides much useful insight into black life. Randolph Domonic presented a paper reflecting his work on the Abyssinian Church of Portland, Maine, and Randolph Stakeman has two articles forthcoming on black life in New England’s largest state. Cottrol explores the history of blacks in Providence before the Civil War, while Horton examines Boston during the same period. Coughtry and Jones have each published articles on Rhode Island blacks. The present work is part of growing scholarly interest in New England’s colonial black past

Book Review Essay: Brazilian Race Relations in Hemispheric Perspective

The late Oliver C. Cox, one of the most insightful black Americans from the leftist tradition, was not often fooled. In his classic 1948 work, Caste, Class, and Race, Cox, a long-time professor of sociology at Lincoln University in Missouri, revealed the nonsensical underpinnings of what then passed for the serious study of comparative race relations among sociologists in the United States. So successful was Cox that his book was thoroughly and deeply buried by the sociological establishment. When Pierre L. van den Berghe published Race and Racism: A Comparative Perspective in 1967, sociologists hailed his work as the first of its kind, thereby demonstrating that they had forgotten Cox\u27s work, or at least managed to convince themselves that they had forgotten it. But, while Cox was not taken in by the pretensions of white sociologists (whether born in the United States or imported from Sweden by white sociologists born in the United States) or by the black elites in such varied places as Liberia and Haiti, he was fooled by the Brazilians. He wrote of the Portuguese\u27s remarkable freedom from race prejudice in Brazil. In reality, of course, neither the Portuguese nor their Brazilian descendants were free from race prejudice. But Cox was not the only Afro-American to conclude that Brazilian society was free of racism. Such astute North American black observers as E. Franklin Frazier and Robert S. Abbott were also taken in. Works reviewed include: The Abolition of Slavery and the Aftermath of Emancipation in Brazil, by Rebecca J. Scott et al; Luso-Brazilian Review, Volume 25, 1988. Guest Editor, Stuart B. Schwartz; Race, Class, and Power in Brazil, Pierre-Michel Fontaine (Ed.)

Book Review Essay: Black Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century

The eighteenth century, a growing consensus among historians suggests, was a crucial period in the evolution of racism. Most Europeans entered the century with few fixed ideas on the nature of race and instead thought of themselves and others primarily in ethnic and religious terms. The English who invaded Jamaica (then colonized and occupied by the Spaniards) in 1655, for example, saw themselves as English Christians and the defenders of the island as Spanish “Papists.” Papists for the English of the time were not Christians at all but instead persons enlisted in the army of the anti-Christ. Nearly a century later nationality and religion continued to be important, but Europeans in the New World and the Old were coming also to think of themselves as white. Racial categories became increasingly important. Race emerged as an important way of organizing, explaining, and predicting the behavior of mankind at different times in various parts of the globe, but by the nineteenth century racism was firmly entrenched, In the early years of the 1800s, Europeans primarily employed racist doctrines to legitimate slavery, while near the end of the century racialist thought was used to justify imperialism, economic exploitation, and discrimination

Tri-Racial Enculturation: Red, White, and Black in the South

In an essay published in The Western Journal of Black Studies (1977) I pointed out that while for many years the study of relations between blacks and Native Americans had been neglected by historians and other scholars, recent studies had acknowledged that red folk and black often influenced one another. What I did not point out was that, for the United States. studies of tri-racial contact were almost nonexistent. Things were quite different in studies of Latin America where the realities of social and sexual contact among all three races were reflected not only in works by historians but in those of anthropologists and others. Unfortunately, students of the United States and the 13 colonies that preceded its formation have, until recently, tended to focus either on black/white relations or on relations between whites and Amerindians. Seldom have they coped with the complex reality that all three races were present from the seventeenth century English settlements on. To discuss only one race or the relations between any two is to distort the past

Patterns of Race Hate in the Americas before 1800

The recent growth in the study of the African diaspora reflected in a number of comparative studies calls attention to the ways in which the black experience in the United States — and the thirteen British colonies in North America that preceded its formation — differs from that of blacks elsewhere in the Americas. This paper examines the unique form of race hatred that emerged in North America and places that hatred in the cultural context of race relations in the hemisphere

Averting biodiversity collapse in tropical forest protected areas

The rapid disruption of tropical forests probably imperils global biodiversity more than any other contemporary phenomenon¹⁻³. With deforestation advancing quickly, protected areas are increasingly becoming final refuges for threatened species and natural ecosystem processes. However, many protected areas in the tropics are themselves vulnerable to human encroachment and other environmental stresses⁴⁻⁹. As pressures mount, it is vital to know whether existing reserves can sustain their biodiversity. A critical constraint in addressing this question has been that data describing a broad array of biodiversity groups have been unavailable for a sufficiently large and representative sample of reserves. Here we present a uniquely comprehensive data set on changes over the past 20 to 30 years in 31 functional groups of species and 21 potential drivers of environmental change, for 60 protected areas stratified across the world’s major tropical regions. Our analysis reveals great variation in reserve ‘health’: about half of all reserves have been effective or performed passably, but the rest are experiencing an erosion of biodiversity that is often alarmingly widespread taxonomically and functionally. Habitat disruption, hunting and forest-product exploitation were the strongest predictors of declining reserve health. Crucially, environmental changes immediately outside reserves seemed nearly as important as those inside in determining their ecological fate, with changes inside reserves strongly mirroring those occurring around them. These findings suggest that tropical protected areas are often intimately linked ecologically to their surrounding habitats, and that a failure to stem broad-scale loss and degradation of such habitats could sharply increase the likelihood of serious biodiversity declines.Keywords: Ecology, Environmental scienc