Monday, March 31, 2014
The Evolution of the Trillion Dollar African American Consumer Market
As part of the Created Equal series made possible through a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, UCM will host Dr. Robert E. Weems, William W. Garvey Distinguished Professor of Business History at Wichita State University on April 4, 2014. Dr. Weems will present a talk titled "The Evolution of the TRILLION DOLLAR African American Consumer Market" at Noon in the James C. Kirkpatrick Library room 1260. The event is offered in conjunction with UCM's Politics and Social Justice Week with a grant from the UCM Professional Enhancement Committee. For more information call (660) 543-4404 or email dgillis@ucmo.edu.
Wednesday, February 12, 2014
Created Equal Film Series: Freedom Riders
The Department of History and Anthropology is hosting the second event of our NEH Created Equal Film Series on Saturday, February 22 from 2 to 4 pm at the Black Archives of Mid-America (1722 E. 17th Terrace, Kansas City, MO, 64108). Please RSVP by email to info@blackarchives.org or by calling 816-221-1600.
The event will include a screening of portions of the PBS American Experience film Freedom Riders followed by a panel discussion with speakers: Sharon Sanders Brooks, former Kansas City Councilwoman and Missouri State Representative; Dr. Bonita Butner, Associate Professor and Division Chair, Educational Leadership, Policy & Foundations, University of Missouri- Kansas City; Michael Patton, retired educator with the Kansas City, Missouri, School District; Dr. Gregory Streich, Professor of Political Science at the University of Central Missouri and author of Justice Beyond "Just Us": Dilemmas of Time, Place, and Difference in American Politics and Urban Social Capital: Civil Society and City Life.
The "Created Equal" film series is made possible through a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities as part of its "Bridging Cultures" initiative and in partnership with the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.
The event will include a screening of portions of the PBS American Experience film Freedom Riders followed by a panel discussion with speakers: Sharon Sanders Brooks, former Kansas City Councilwoman and Missouri State Representative; Dr. Bonita Butner, Associate Professor and Division Chair, Educational Leadership, Policy & Foundations, University of Missouri- Kansas City; Michael Patton, retired educator with the Kansas City, Missouri, School District; Dr. Gregory Streich, Professor of Political Science at the University of Central Missouri and author of Justice Beyond "Just Us": Dilemmas of Time, Place, and Difference in American Politics and Urban Social Capital: Civil Society and City Life.
The "Created Equal" film series is made possible through a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities as part of its "Bridging Cultures" initiative and in partnership with the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.
Tuesday, November 12, 2013
Prince Among Slaves
Tonight, at 7:00 in Twomey Auditorium, we host the second National Endowment for the Humanities event of the semester, this one being a part of the Bridging Cultures: Muslim Journeys grant. This event is co-sponsored at UCM by the James C. Kirkpatrick Library and the Department of History and Anthropology. Dr. Jessica Cannon will lead the discussion, which will follow a public viewing of the PBS film Prince Among Slaves. The focus will be on Abdul-Rahman Ibrahima, an African prince who was captured and sold into slavery, spent forty years as a slave on a cotton plantation outside of Natchez, Mississippi, and eventually was given his freedom through an amazing twist of fate--John Cox, a white doctor whom his family had once saved along the African coast, runs into Ibrahima some twenty years later in America. Through letters written to Africa and U.S. officials, including the President, Ibrahima is eventually freed and given passage back to Africa.
Ibrahima was not the only West African slave who brought Muslim religious traditions to the American South; some tens of thousands of enslaved individuals lived similar lives trying to acculturate to the Protestant south. Nor is he the only slave to escape slavery, as the recent movie Twelve Years a Slave attests. These lesser-known stories of resistance and individuality amid the destructive forces of slavery are beginning to receive long-deserved attention.
There are many additional resources to investigate if these topics interest you. You can check out the PBS movie Prince Among Slaves from the JCK Library at UCM, along with the book by the same name from author Terry Alford. There are several dozen other books and videos in the library as part of the Muslim Journeys Bookshelf you can also check out.
Online, an excellent resource is the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database which documents almost 35,000 slaving voyages between 1514 and 1866. The website is: http://slavevoyages.org/tast/index/faces .
Ibrahima was not the only West African slave who brought Muslim religious traditions to the American South; some tens of thousands of enslaved individuals lived similar lives trying to acculturate to the Protestant south. Nor is he the only slave to escape slavery, as the recent movie Twelve Years a Slave attests. These lesser-known stories of resistance and individuality amid the destructive forces of slavery are beginning to receive long-deserved attention.
There are many additional resources to investigate if these topics interest you. You can check out the PBS movie Prince Among Slaves from the JCK Library at UCM, along with the book by the same name from author Terry Alford. There are several dozen other books and videos in the library as part of the Muslim Journeys Bookshelf you can also check out.
Online, an excellent resource is the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database which documents almost 35,000 slaving voyages between 1514 and 1866. The website is: http://slavevoyages.org/tast/index/faces .
Sunday, October 6, 2013
Women in the Antislavery Movement
For those interested in a view of the abolition movement from the bottom up, Julie Roy Jeffrey’s, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism, Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement (University of North Carolina Press, 1998) focuses our attention on the hundreds of “silent” women who worked tirelessly in deceptively ordinary ways, to promote abolition in rural communities and churches. According to Jeffrey, their continuous efforts on behalf of abolition evolved over time and helped sustain the movement. Although most did not become the radical feminists we associate with abolition, Jeffrey argues their activities on behalf of abolition did cause them to stretch themselves and to question traditional ideas about gender.
Dr. Sara Brooks Sundberg
Dr. Sara Brooks Sundberg
Wednesday, October 2, 2013
John Brown
The Abolitionists film segment we watched, which is part of the first episode, mentioned John Brown's conversion experience and his determination to fight slavery in America. Episode three of the film series addresses this topic in much more detail, talking at length about John Brown's actions in Kansas and at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, in 1856 and 1859 respectively.
John Brown has been a controversial figure in both public memory and historical accounts since the 1850s. Some see his violent actions to bring about an immediate end to slavery as unjustified, while others argue that the nation needed some sort of 'shock' to recognize the realities of the institution of slavery that was itself violent and abusive. When is moral suasion not enough and more determined action to end slavery is necessary?
The Smithsonian's Museum of American History has an interesting video on their YouTube channel (about 7 minutes long) which asks us to consider exactly that moral dilemma--as a member of John Brown's "jury" in 1859, how would you respond to his actions and his motives?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcoIkUIUS6s&feature=plcp
As we approach the anniversary of Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, October 16-18, it seems appropriate to examine this question here.
John Brown has been a controversial figure in both public memory and historical accounts since the 1850s. Some see his violent actions to bring about an immediate end to slavery as unjustified, while others argue that the nation needed some sort of 'shock' to recognize the realities of the institution of slavery that was itself violent and abusive. When is moral suasion not enough and more determined action to end slavery is necessary?
The Smithsonian's Museum of American History has an interesting video on their YouTube channel (about 7 minutes long) which asks us to consider exactly that moral dilemma--as a member of John Brown's "jury" in 1859, how would you respond to his actions and his motives?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcoIkUIUS6s&feature=plcp
As we approach the anniversary of Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, October 16-18, it seems appropriate to examine this question here.
Thursday, September 26, 2013
Web Resources for Slavery and Emancipation in the United States
Here are a few additional websites with primary sources and secondary interpretive essays covering the topics of slavery and emancipation in the United States.
The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record
http://hitchcock.itc.virginia.edu/Slavery/index.php
The Abolition of the Slave Trade
http://abolition.nypl.org/home/
Freedmen and Southern Society Project
http://www.freedmen.umd.edu/sampdocs.htm
The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record
http://hitchcock.itc.virginia.edu/Slavery/index.php
The Abolition of the Slave Trade
http://abolition.nypl.org/home/
Freedmen and Southern Society Project
http://www.freedmen.umd.edu/sampdocs.htm
Slavery in the Spanish World
This is a post by guest author Dr. Dan Crews, Professor in the Department of History and Anthropology at UCM.
The discussion following the film and panel on “The Abolitionists” brought out connections of slavery in the US to the “Atlantic World,” or “Atlantic Worlds.” As a Professor of Spanish and Latin American History, I will comment briefly on the significance of what is usually referred to as the “Tannenbaum Thesis,” or the “Freyre-Tannenbaum Thesis,” or the “Tannenbaum-Elkins Thesis.” Obviously Tannenbaum’s 1948 classic, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas is the crucial work.
In 1922 Gilberto Freyre, a Brazilian graduate student at Columbia, published an article in the Hispanic American Historical Review that drew contrasts between the culture of slavery in Brazil and the U.S. To my knowledge, this is the origin of modern studies of comparative slavery, i.e. that Black slavery is not the same everywhere. In 1946 Freyre fleshed his argument out in his masterpiece The Masters and the Slave. The next year Tannenbaum published his classic focusing more narrowly on legal and religious institutions. Spanish laws on slavery derived from Roman law, the Justinian Code, adopted into Spanish law in 1215. In Roman law slaves, who could be from any race, had the right to earn property and purchase their freedom. Indeed, grandchildren of slaves could hold any public office in the Empire. The second-century emperor Pertinax was in fact the grandson of a slave. The Catholic Church forbade requiring work on feast days, prohibited the break up of families and encouraged church attendance meaning limited access to education. Since North American slave laws derived from British Common Law, they assumed, according to Tannenbaum, that being a slave meant being Black, the legal precedents were established in this context. Put simply, the “Freyre-Tannenbaum Thesis” holds that the humanity of Black slaves was not ignored in Latin America to the degree that it was in North America. The strongest support for the thesis has and continues to be the degree of inter-racial marriage, and the general lack of racial conflict between Blacks and Whites in post-emancipation Latin America. There were no Jim Crow segregation laws in Latin America.
Stanley Elkins adopted Tannenbaum’s thesis, but also went into the psychology of slavery in North and South America. According to Elkins the Manichean division of Black and White led to the creation of a “Sambo psychology” in North America. The first edition of Elkins’ Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life appeared in 1959, and the third addition in 1976. Several scholars have taken issue with some of Elkins’ psychological arguments, especially Eugene Genovese, but the “Elkins-Tannenbaum Thesis” continued to find supporters as in Nell Irvin Painter’s Southern History Across the Color Line, 2002. Meanwhile the core of the “Freyre-Tannenbaum Thesis” continues to be very strong in Colonial Spanish and Latin American studies as demonstrated in Jane Landers’ Black Society in Florida, 1999, and Herbert Klein and Ben Vinson, African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean, 2007.
While Latin America definitely has its problems, racial tensions between White and Black have not been much of a cause for social unrest. Indeed, the idea of a Latin American “cosmic race” has been the root of much of twentieth-century Latin American nationalism, from José Marti in the 1890s to the “Bolivarian Revolution” of Hugo Chavez.
For a good introduction to the scholarly debates surrounding the Tannenbaum thesis, see Laura Foner and Eugene Genovese, eds., Slavery in the New World, 1970.
Editor's Note:
While slave violence in the Spanish colonies of the southern U.S., Central, and South America centered primarily around the Indian-Spaniard-Creole ethnic dynamic, blacks enslaved by the Spanish did, on occasion, revolt--for example, see Sir Walter Raleigh's alliance with the Cimarrons (black escaped slaves) in Panama against the Spanish in the 1570s. Stanley Elkin's conclusions about the differences between Brazilian and American slavery may still apply in Latin American studies, but his conclusions about the passivity of American slaves have been subsequently overturned by numerous studies over the last forty years. Slaves in America resisted their masters in many ways, from milder examples of destroying property and theft of foodstuffs to full rebellion in the case of Nat Turner's Revolt. Moreover, as slaves were taught trades or sent to cities to work, they further undermined the institution of slavery by creating space for lives outside the control of whites. In some cases, they even earned enough to purchase their freedom. As Eugene Genovese wrote in From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World (1979):
Two books that provide an excellent overview of the scholarship on slavery in the last three decades of the twentieth century are: John B. Boles, Black Southerners 1619-1869 (1984) and Peter Kolchin American Slavery 1619-1877 (2003). For additional readings on this topic, see:
John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community (1972).
John Hope Franklin and Lauren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (2000).
Sylvia Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (1992).
Eugene Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll (1974).
Patrick Manning, The African Diaspora: A History through Culture (2010).
David Northrup, Crosscurrents in the Black Atlantic 1770-1965 (2007).
Sue Peabody and Keila Grinberg, Slavery, Freedom and the Law in the Atlantic World (2007).
Robert Starobin, Industrial Slavery in the Old South (1971).
Richard C. Wade, Slavery in the Cities (1967).
The discussion following the film and panel on “The Abolitionists” brought out connections of slavery in the US to the “Atlantic World,” or “Atlantic Worlds.” As a Professor of Spanish and Latin American History, I will comment briefly on the significance of what is usually referred to as the “Tannenbaum Thesis,” or the “Freyre-Tannenbaum Thesis,” or the “Tannenbaum-Elkins Thesis.” Obviously Tannenbaum’s 1948 classic, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas is the crucial work.
In 1922 Gilberto Freyre, a Brazilian graduate student at Columbia, published an article in the Hispanic American Historical Review that drew contrasts between the culture of slavery in Brazil and the U.S. To my knowledge, this is the origin of modern studies of comparative slavery, i.e. that Black slavery is not the same everywhere. In 1946 Freyre fleshed his argument out in his masterpiece The Masters and the Slave. The next year Tannenbaum published his classic focusing more narrowly on legal and religious institutions. Spanish laws on slavery derived from Roman law, the Justinian Code, adopted into Spanish law in 1215. In Roman law slaves, who could be from any race, had the right to earn property and purchase their freedom. Indeed, grandchildren of slaves could hold any public office in the Empire. The second-century emperor Pertinax was in fact the grandson of a slave. The Catholic Church forbade requiring work on feast days, prohibited the break up of families and encouraged church attendance meaning limited access to education. Since North American slave laws derived from British Common Law, they assumed, according to Tannenbaum, that being a slave meant being Black, the legal precedents were established in this context. Put simply, the “Freyre-Tannenbaum Thesis” holds that the humanity of Black slaves was not ignored in Latin America to the degree that it was in North America. The strongest support for the thesis has and continues to be the degree of inter-racial marriage, and the general lack of racial conflict between Blacks and Whites in post-emancipation Latin America. There were no Jim Crow segregation laws in Latin America.
Stanley Elkins adopted Tannenbaum’s thesis, but also went into the psychology of slavery in North and South America. According to Elkins the Manichean division of Black and White led to the creation of a “Sambo psychology” in North America. The first edition of Elkins’ Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life appeared in 1959, and the third addition in 1976. Several scholars have taken issue with some of Elkins’ psychological arguments, especially Eugene Genovese, but the “Elkins-Tannenbaum Thesis” continued to find supporters as in Nell Irvin Painter’s Southern History Across the Color Line, 2002. Meanwhile the core of the “Freyre-Tannenbaum Thesis” continues to be very strong in Colonial Spanish and Latin American studies as demonstrated in Jane Landers’ Black Society in Florida, 1999, and Herbert Klein and Ben Vinson, African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean, 2007.
While Latin America definitely has its problems, racial tensions between White and Black have not been much of a cause for social unrest. Indeed, the idea of a Latin American “cosmic race” has been the root of much of twentieth-century Latin American nationalism, from José Marti in the 1890s to the “Bolivarian Revolution” of Hugo Chavez.
For a good introduction to the scholarly debates surrounding the Tannenbaum thesis, see Laura Foner and Eugene Genovese, eds., Slavery in the New World, 1970.
Editor's Note:
While slave violence in the Spanish colonies of the southern U.S., Central, and South America centered primarily around the Indian-Spaniard-Creole ethnic dynamic, blacks enslaved by the Spanish did, on occasion, revolt--for example, see Sir Walter Raleigh's alliance with the Cimarrons (black escaped slaves) in Panama against the Spanish in the 1570s. Stanley Elkin's conclusions about the differences between Brazilian and American slavery may still apply in Latin American studies, but his conclusions about the passivity of American slaves have been subsequently overturned by numerous studies over the last forty years. Slaves in America resisted their masters in many ways, from milder examples of destroying property and theft of foodstuffs to full rebellion in the case of Nat Turner's Revolt. Moreover, as slaves were taught trades or sent to cities to work, they further undermined the institution of slavery by creating space for lives outside the control of whites. In some cases, they even earned enough to purchase their freedom. As Eugene Genovese wrote in From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World (1979):
"Accordingly, the legend of black docility in slavery appears the more ironic
as well as the more ludicrous, for, so far as the evidence allows generalization,
no enslaved people in world history rose in revolt so often or in such numbers
or with so large a measure of success [as in the Americas]. The slaves of the Old South
rose much less frequently, in fewer numbers, and less successfully than those of
the Caribbean region and South America, but they too made vital contributions
to the history of revolt." (xxii)
rose much less frequently, in fewer numbers, and less successfully than those of
the Caribbean region and South America, but they too made vital contributions
to the history of revolt." (xxii)
Two books that provide an excellent overview of the scholarship on slavery in the last three decades of the twentieth century are: John B. Boles, Black Southerners 1619-1869 (1984) and Peter Kolchin American Slavery 1619-1877 (2003). For additional readings on this topic, see:
John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community (1972).
John Hope Franklin and Lauren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (2000).
Sylvia Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (1992).
Eugene Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll (1974).
Patrick Manning, The African Diaspora: A History through Culture (2010).
David Northrup, Crosscurrents in the Black Atlantic 1770-1965 (2007).
Sue Peabody and Keila Grinberg, Slavery, Freedom and the Law in the Atlantic World (2007).
Robert Starobin, Industrial Slavery in the Old South (1971).
Richard C. Wade, Slavery in the Cities (1967).
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