Search Results

Pride and Pulchritude: Campus Pageant Politics, 1920–1980

Karen W. Tice

in Queens of Academe: Beauty Pageants and Campus Life

This chapter begins with two in-depth case studies of a historically black university and a predominantly white university in the South from the 1920s through the 1980s, to examine generational and ... More

This chapter begins with two in-depth case studies of a historically black university and a predominantly white university in the South from the 1920s through the 1980s, to examine generational and racialized differences in the investment, meanings, and performance of gendered and classed distinction and desirability, the impact of shifting patterns of racial integration and segregation, the policing of student bodies through etiquette and grooming, the proliferation of campus queen contests as hundreds of college women represented their dorms and departments wearing tiaras, and the commercialization and export of collegiate beauty queens to local businesses and festivals. These studies also illuminate the changing contours of campus pageants, including the impact of civil rights organizing, black power student movements, and second wave feminism. A third case study examines the protracted racial turmoil that ensued at Indiana University when African American students repeatedly challenged normative iterations of beauty in student pageant rituals.Less

Soul Style on Campus: American College Women and Black Power Fashion

Tanisha C. Ford

in Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul

This chapter traces how soul style developed in historically black and mainstream institutions in the late 1960s and early 1970s as the student movement takes a radical turn. The chapter demonstrates ... More

This chapter traces how soul style developed in historically black and mainstream institutions in the late 1960s and early 1970s as the student movement takes a radical turn. The chapter demonstrates that the college campus was an important site for examining how soul vocabulary was adopted and adapted by a generation of black women students to contest the status quo. As radical activists such as the Black Panthers and Angela Davis became household names, their style of dress became popular among college students. The chapter offers a close reading of magazines and yearbooks to explore how hairstyles such as the Afro and garments such as black leather jackets and African-printed bell bottoms became popular American fashion trends.Less

Minority-Serving Colleges in the United States

in Uncommon Schools: The Global Rise of Postsecondary Institutions for Indigenous Peoples

This chapter considers the social, political, and legal circumstances giving rise to colleges and universities that serve American Indians and African Americans. It analyzes the effect of ... More

This chapter considers the social, political, and legal circumstances giving rise to colleges and universities that serve American Indians and African Americans. It analyzes the effect of intranational differences in the incorporation of American Indians and African Americans on the establishment of tribal colleges and universities (TCUs) and historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in the United States.Less

New Negro Messengers in Dixie: James Ivy, Thomas Dabney, and Black Cultural Criticism in the Postwar Us South, 1919–1930

Claudrena N. Harold

in The Black Intellectual Tradition: African American Thought in the Twentieth Century

This essay examines the central roles of Black faculty at historical Black colleges and universities and their radical pedagogical work as major incubators of Black progressive thought in the early ... More

This essay examines the central roles of Black faculty at historical Black colleges and universities and their radical pedagogical work as major incubators of Black progressive thought in the early twentieth century. Despite pressures to emulate the manual-training curriculum implemented by Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, Virginia Union University built a progressive faculty deeply committed to supplying Black students with the intellectual training necessary to address global problems of White supremacy and labor exploitation. Black students were self-consciously determined to view their career contributions in terms beyond just scholarly impact, and this chapter illustrates how the larger calling of developing the imaginations of Black students would profoundly shape the development of Black social science literature during the first half of the twentieth century.Less

. Black Greek-Letter Organizations at Predominantly White Institutions and Historically Black Colleges and Universities

Terrell L. Strayhorn and Fred C. Mccall

in Black Greek-Letter Organizations 2.0: New Directions in the Study of African American Fraternities and Sororities

This chapter examines the everyday life of black Greek-letter organizations (BGLOs) on predominantly white institutions (PWIs) and historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). Drawing on ... More

This chapter examines the everyday life of black Greek-letter organizations (BGLOs) on predominantly white institutions (PWIs) and historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). Drawing on data from publications and interviews with students, it looks at the reasons why African Americans join BGLOs and the perceived benefits of membership. It also probes their experiences within such organizations using socialization theory and explains how intrinsic/extrinsic motivations, investments, knowledge acquisition, and benefits all vary when compared to joining a BGLO at a PWI or an HBCU.Less

Ethnocentric Curricula and the Politics of Difference

in Uncommon Schools: The Global Rise of Postsecondary Institutions for Indigenous Peoples

Ethnocentrism is a curricular orientation in which the experiences and perspectives, the culture, and the identity of a particular group are centered as the point of reference and development. This ... More

Ethnocentrism is a curricular orientation in which the experiences and perspectives, the culture, and the identity of a particular group are centered as the point of reference and development. This chapter presents results from a statistical analysis of tribal and black college curricula, focusing in particular on the institutional, political, and legal forces that shape the composition of formal curricula at tribal colleges and universities (TCUs) and historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). The chapter presents evidence that TCUs incorporate distinctively American Indian traditions and worldviews into the formal curriculum much more extensively than HBCUs incorporate African American content or perspectives. Tribal sovereignty plays a central role in the efforts of American Indians tribes to infuse culturally distinctive curricula at their own colleges and universities. African Americans, who lack sovereignty, have been much less successful at doing so.Less

Climbing the Hilltop: New Negro Womanhood at Howard University

Treva B. Lindsey

in Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood in Washington, D.C.

By the first decade of the twentieth century, Howard University emerged as the premier institution for higher learning for African Americans. Using the life of Lucy Diggs Slowe, a Howard alumnus and ... More

By the first decade of the twentieth century, Howard University emerged as the premier institution for higher learning for African Americans. Using the life of Lucy Diggs Slowe, a Howard alumnus and the first Dean of Women at Howard, this chapter discusses the experiences of African American women at Howard during the early twentieth century to illustrate how New Negro women negotiated intra-racial gender ideologies and conventions as well as Jim Crow racial politics. Although women could attend and work at Howard, extant African American gender ideologies often limited African American women’s opportunities as students, faculty, and staff. Slowe was arguably the most vocal advocate for African American women at Howard. She demanded that African American women be prepared for the “modern world,” and that African American women be full and equal participants in public culture. Her thirty-plus years affiliation with Howard makes her an ideal subject with which to map the emergence of New Negro womanhood at this prestigious university. This chapter presents Howard as an elite and exclusive site for the actualization of New Negro womanhood while simultaneously asserting the symbolic significance of Howard University for African American women living in and moving to Washington. Although most African American women in Washington could not and did not attend or work at Howard, this institution was foundational to an emergent sense of possibility and aspiration that propelled the intellectual and cultural strivings of African American women in New Negro era Washington.Less

Southern (Dis)Comfort: Creating and Consuming Homosex in the Black South

E. Patrick Johnson

in Creating and Consuming the American South

In this essay, Johnson, author of Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men in the South—An Oral History (2008), returns to that book’s source material to consider how his interviewees re-created a variety of ... More

In this essay, Johnson, author of Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men in the South—An Oral History (2008), returns to that book’s source material to consider how his interviewees re-created a variety of southern loci—New Orleans, black colleges, golf courses and country clubs—in ways that facilitated homosexual identity formation while challenging established binaries between gay and straight, black and white, and work and play. Whereas Sweet Tea gives voice to the men’s lives without analysis, here Johnson critically engages some of the stories that exemplify the ways in which same-sex encounters involving black southern men also shed light on the history of black homosexuality in the South. The essay argues that black gay men are creating multiple Souths as sexual dissidents and gender non-conformists whose sexuality is shaped not only by the history of race in the region but also by the spaces their queer bodies create and consume.Less

The Other Side of the “Free” way: Planning for “Separate But Equal” in the Wake of Massive Resistance

K. Ian Grandison

in Race and Real Estate

This chapter conveys the continuing intertwining of racial hierarchy and real estate in America. Focusing on the case of one historically black college/university (HBCU), Virginia Union University, ... More

This chapter conveys the continuing intertwining of racial hierarchy and real estate in America. Focusing on the case of one historically black college/university (HBCU), Virginia Union University, the chapter shows how Richmond, VA, planned its I-95/I-64 corridor in the 1950s to reposition the institution inside a racial reservation. That estrangement, effected, ironically, in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, aimed to dampen the university’s mission to facilitate equal access to citizenship through higher education. City planners forced the campus onto the “wrong” side of the “free” way, deliberately transforming the campus’s immediate and wider setting—the legendary black neighborhood of Jackson Ward—into a landscape of demolition, divestment, industrial blight, and declining equity. This Richmond case study illustrates how racial segregation and inequality continue to be enforced through urban and regional planning, architecture, and landscape architecture—especially connected with highway infrastructure and urban “revitalization”—all over the United States. The chapter reveals that real estate is racially contingent, rigged to protect and enhance the value and inheritance of some institutions and communities while purposively exposing and diminishing the marketable value of others.Less

Focus on Yerby: Transforming Teaching and Research at Paine College

Catherine L. Adams

in Rediscovering Frank Yerby: Critical Essays

This chapter explores teaching Yerby at his alma mater, a project rooted in a necessity to positively impact and inspire a new generation of students to read, write, and research the school’s most ... More

This chapter explores teaching Yerby at his alma mater, a project rooted in a necessity to positively impact and inspire a new generation of students to read, write, and research the school’s most famous literary alumnus. The multi-year engagement with Yerby’s work involved students, faculty, and the community. With a writing career that spanned more than half of the twentieth century, Frank Yerby’s work has sporadically emerged as fertile ground for teaching and research at Paine College. The archives at Paine include correspondence between Yerby and his editor, Bob Cornfield, at Dial Press. Also included are programs and articles that document Yerby’s early connections to his former English professor, Emma C. W. Gray, Paine College’s President, E.C. Peters, and then reconnections that begin with President E. Clayton Calhoun (the last white president of the Paine College) in the mid-60s.Less

Booker T. Washington’s African at Home

Ira Dworkin

in Congo Love Song: African American Culture and the Crisis of the Colonial State

This chapter examines Washington’s service as Vice President of the Congo Reform Association (CRA) as a means of considering more broadly the relationship of HBCUs to Africa. Although Washington ... More

This chapter examines Washington’s service as Vice President of the Congo Reform Association (CRA) as a means of considering more broadly the relationship of HBCUs to Africa. Although Washington never traveled to Africa, he was directly influenced by Sheppard, his former Hampton student. As the founding principal of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, Washington, the most prominent African American leader of his day, brings the Congo into relief as an important nexus for developing ideas about race, ideology, and empire in American culture in ways that are visible in everything from his famous 1895 address at the Atlanta Cotton States Exposition to his influential collaboration with sociologist Robert E. Park. Washington’s professional mobility can help scholars expand Gilroy’s conception of the “Black Atlantic” to include HBCUs as critical contact zones for emerging understandings of a dynamic U.S. relationship with Africa.Less