Roanoke, Virginia, is one of America's great historic railroad centers. The Norfolk & Western Railway Company, now the Norfolk Southern Corporation, has been in Roanoke for over a century. Since the company has employed many of the city's African Americans, the two histories are intertwined. The lives of Roanoke's black railroad workers span the generations from Jim Crow segregation to the civil rights era to today's diverse corporate workforce. Older generations toiled through labor-intensive jobs such as janitors and track laborers, paving the way for younger African Americans to become engineers, conductors and executives. Join author Sheree Scarborough as she interviews Roanoke's African American railroad workers and chronicles stories that are a powerful testament of personal adversity, struggle and triumph on the rail.
This two-volume set is a thematically-arranged encyclopedia covering the social, political, and material culture of America during the Jim Crow Era. What was daily life really like for ordinary African American people in Jim Crow America, the hundred-year period of enforced legal segregation that began immediately after the Civil War and continued until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965? What did they eat, wear, believe, and think? How did they raise their children? How did they interact with government? What did they value? What did they do for fun? This Daily Life encyclopedia explores the lives of average people through the examination of social, cultural, and material history. Supported by the most current research, the multivolume set examines social history topics—including family, political, religious, and economic life—as it illuminates elements of a society's emotional life, interactions, opinions, views, beliefs, intimate relationships, and connections between individuals and the greater world. It is broken up into topical sections, each dealing with a different aspect of cultural life. Each section opens with an introductory essay, followed by A–Z entries on various aspects of that topic.
The true story of two African-American brothers who were kidnapped and displayed as circus freaks, and whose mother endured a 28-year struggle to get them back. The year was 1899 and the place a sweltering tobacco farm in the Jim Crow South town of Truevine, Virginia. George and Willie Muse were two little boys born to a sharecropper family. One day a white man offered them a piece of candy, setting off events that would take them around the world and change their lives forever. Captured into the circus, the Muse brothers performed for royalty at Buckingham Palace and headlined over a dozen sold-out shows at New York's Madison Square Garden. They were global superstars in a pre-broadcast era. But the very root of their success was in the color of their skin and in the outrageous caricatures they were forced to assume: supposed cannibals, sheep-headed freaks, even "Ambassadors from Mars." Back home, their mother never accepted that they were "gone" and spent 28 years trying to get them back. Through hundreds of interviews and decades of research, Beth Macy expertly explores a central and difficult question: Where were the brothers better off? On the world stage as stars or in poverty at home? Truevine is a compelling narrative rich in historical detail and rife with implications to race relations today.
Queer history is a living practice. Talk to any group of LGBTQ people today, and they will not agree on what story should be told. Many people desire to celebrate the past by erecting plaques and painting rainbow crosswalks, but queer and trans people in the twenty-first century need more than just symbols—they need access to power, justice for marginalized people, spaces of belonging. Approaching the past through a lens of queer and trans survival and world-building transforms history itself into a tool for imagining and realizing a better future. Living Queer History tells the story of an LGBTQ community in Roanoke, Virginia, a small city on the edge of Appalachia. Interweaving &8239;historical analysis, theory, and memoir, Gregory Samantha Rosenthal tells the story of their own journey—coming out and transitioning as a transgender woman—in the midst of working on a community-based history project that documented a multigenerational southern LGBTQ community. Based on over forty interviews with LGBTQ elders, Living Queer History explores how queer people today think about the past and how history lives on in the present.
Tells the story of a city that for a brief period was widely hailed as a regional model for industrialization as well as the ultimate success symbol for the rehabilitation of the former Confederacy. In a region where modernization seemed to move at a glacial pace, those looking for signs of what they were triumphantly calling the "New South" pointed to Roanoke. No southern city grew faster than Roanoke did during the 1880s. A hardscrabble Appalachian tobacco depot originally known by the uninspiring name of Big Lick, it became a veritable boomtown by the end of the decade as a steady stream of investment and skilled manpower flowed in from north of the Mason-Dixon line. The first scholarly treatment of Roanoke's early history, the book explains how native businessmen convinced a northern investment company to make their small town a major railroad hub. It then describes how that venture initially paid off, as the influx of thousands of people from the North and the surrounding Virginia countryside helped make Roanoke - presumptuously christened the "Magic City" by New South proponents - the state's third-largest city by the turn of the century. Rand Dotson recounts what life was like for Roanoke's wealthy elites, working poor, and African American inhabitants. He also explores the social conflicts that ultimately erupted as a result of well-intended 3reforms4 initiated by city leaders. Dotson illustrates how residents mediated the catastrophic Depression of 1893 and that year's infamous Roanoke Riot, which exposed the faȧde masking the city's racial tensions, inadequate physical infrastructure, and provincial mentality of the local populace. Dotson then details the subsequent attempts of business boosters and progressive reformers to attract the additional investments needed to put their city back on track. Ultimately, Dotson explains, Roanoke's early struggles stemmed from its business leaders' unwavering belief that economic development would serve as the panacea for all of the town's problems.
Born in Roanoke County, Virginia, on the eve of the Emancipation Proclamation, Richard L. Davis was an early mine labor organizer in Rendville, Ohio. One year after the 1884 Great Hocking Valley Coal Strike, which lasted nine months, Davis wrote the first of many letters to the National Labor Tribune and the United Mine Workers Journal. One of two African Americans at the founding convention of United Mine Workers of America in 1890, he served as a member of the National Executive Board in 1886-97. Davis called upon white and black miners to unite against wage slavery. This biography provides a detailed portrait of one of America's more influential labor organizers.
With information on over 500 organizations, their founders and membership, this unique encyclopedia is an invaluable resource on the history of African-American activism. Entries on both historical and contemporary organizations include: * African Aid Society * African-Americans forHumanism * Black Academy of Arts and Letters * BlackWomen's Liberation Committee * Minority Women in Science* National Association of Black Geologists andGeophysicists * National Dental Association * NationalMedical Association * Negro Railway Labor ExecutivesCommittee * Pennsylvania Freedmen's Relief Association *Women's Missionary Society, African Methodist EpiscopalChurch * and many more.
Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in an urban elementary school, this volume is an examination of how school division politics, regional economic policies, parental concerns, urban development efforts, popular cultures, gender ideologies, racial politics, and university and corporate agendas come together to produce educational effects. Unlike conventional school ethnographies, the focus of this work is less on classrooms than on the webs of social relations that embed schools in neighborhoods, cities, states, and regions. Utilizing a variety of narratives and analytical styles, this volume: * explores how curriculum innovations are simultaneously made possible by and undermined by school district politics, neighborhood histories, and the spatial and temporal organizations of teachers' and parents' lives; * situates the educational discourse of administrators and teachers in the changing economic and political climates of the city; * analyzes the motivations behind an effort by school and business proponents to refashion classrooms within the school into business enterprises, and of children's efforts to make sense of the scheme; * examines the role of the school as a neighborhood institution, situating it at the intersections of city planners' efforts to regulate city space and children's efforts to carve out live spaces through out-of-school routines; * contemplates the meaning of school as a site for bodily experience, and looks at how patterns of space and control in the school shaped children's bodies, and at how they continued to use body-based languages to construct maturity, gender, and race; and * investigates the school as a space for the deployment of symbolic resources where children learned and constructed identities through their engagements with television, comic books, movies, and sports. Tangled Up In School raises questions about how we draw the boundaries of the school, about how schools fit into the lives of children and cities, and about what we mean when we talk about "school."
Although widely viewed as the beginning of the legal struggle to end segregation, the U.S. Supreme Court's decision Brown v. Board of Education was in fact the culmination of decades of legal challenges led by a band of lawyers intent on dismantling segregation one statute at a time. Root and Branch is the compelling story of the fiercely committed lawyers that constructed the legal foundation for what we now call the civil rights movement. Charles Hamilton Houston laid the groundwork, reinventing the law school at Howard University (where he taught a young, brash Thurgood Marshall) and becoming special counsel to the NAACP. Later Houston and Marshall traveled through the hostile South, looking for cases with which to dismantle America's long-systematized racism, often at great personal risk. The abstemious, buttoned-down Houston and the folksy, easygoing Marshall made an unlikely pair-but their accomplishments in bringing down Jim Crow made an unforgettable impact on U.S. legal history.
