Conference Welcome, "Northern Struggles: New Paradigms in Civil Rights"

In September of 2004 the Frederick Douglass Institute for African and African-American Studies sponsored a conference, "Northern Struggles: New Paradigms in Civil Rights," that brought together major scholars of northern civil rights history. This document is the welcoming address by conference organizer, Victoria Wolcott

"Integrated Leisure in Segregated Cities: Amusement Parks and Racial Conflict in the Post-War North"

Paper presented at the 2004 Urban History Association ConferenceThis conference paper examines the desegregation of amusement parks in the urban North after World War II. In a period when northern cities were becoming increasingly segregated, spaces of leisure were integrated by Civil Rights activists and African-American consumers. The result was often racial violence and white abandonment of urban recreation

“Moving the Movement North: A Roundtable on the Northern Freedom Struggle”

Opening comments for a roundtable on the northern civil rights movement presented at the Third Biennial Urban History Conference in Tempe, Arizona, October 2006

A Community Transformed: African-American Women and Detroit’s Great Migration

An invited lecture at Marygrove College in Detroit, Michigan based on my book _Remaking Respectability: African American Women in Interwar Detroit_

Remaking respectability: African-American women and the politics of identity in interwar Detroit.

This dissertation traces the ways in which African-American women in Detroit negotiated community and individual identity from the Great Migration through the Great Depression. Divergent notions of appropriate behavior and deportment shaped the actions and interactions of elite and working-class African-American women during this period. Respectability, in particular, was a language and set of practices that had different meanings for different groups of women as African-Americans moved to Northern cities during the Great Migration. During the 1910s and 1920s Detroit's African-American reformers relied on images of "respectable" women to promote a community identity through public displays of "proper" dress and deportment. Meanwhile, individual female migrants engaged in activities that crossed lines of "rough" and "respectable" as they negotiated an urban terrain of saloons, disorderly houses and dance halls as well as settlement houses, churches and training centers. By the 1930s, dominate notions of African-Americans were "remade" as reformers focused less on religious and moral codes based on female respectability, and more on the employment of African-American men, youth delinquency, and the struggle for civil rights. In most narratives of the Great Migration, the African-American male industrial worker has been the central protagonist. Contemporaries of that migration, however, viewed female migrants as "seeds" of a new Northern community, carrying morality, education, and religiosity to the homes that would form the center of African-American urban neighborhoods. This dissertation rewrites early twentieth-century African-American history by placing women at the center of the story of migration and the growth of new urban African-American communities. In the field of women's history, the story of African-American women has not focused on the crucial inter-war period when reformers and migrants struggled with the relationship between gender roles, and community building. Thus, this dissertation fills a major lacuna in both African-American and Women's history by tracing the movement of southern African-American women to Detroit, and examining how a reform discourse of female respectability shaped the institutional responses to the Great Migration.Ph.D.HistoryUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/104886/1/9610269.pdfDescription of 9610269.pdf : Restricted to UM users only

I too sing America : the sense of place in African American music, 1920-1992

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Dept. of History, 2013.The sense of place has been a recurring theme in African American popular music. From the country blues of the 1920s to contemporary urban rap, songs detailing living spaces and geographic places have offered broader messages about how blacks have viewed their place of belonging and social position in America. This project traces the evolution of these messages in various 20th century African American music styles such as blues, rock n’ roll, soul, funk and rap and assesses what they suggest about the changing status of blacks in America as well as the centrality of space and place in the African American experience