Theses and Dissertations - Department of History

Permanent URI for this collection

https://ir.ua.edu/handle/123456789/110

Browse

Browsing Theses and Dissertations - Department of History by Author "Brundage, W. Fitzhugh"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    "the best notes made the most votes": race, politics, and spectacle in the South, 1877-1932
    (University of Alabama Libraries, 2016) Johnson, Mark A.; Frederickson, Kari A.; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
    From the end of Reconstruction in 1877 to the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, black southerners influenced local, state, and national politics and challenged white supremacy by performing at political spectacles. Reformers, Lost Cause advocates, and party leaders employed spectacle to generate enthusiasm, demonstrate the strength of the party, mobilize voters, legitimize electoral results, and spread their platforms. Before disfranchisement, African Americans played prominent roles in these spectacles as performers, orators, musicians, marchers, and torchbearers. Despite attempts to eliminate spectacles and restrict voting, southerners continued to view spectacle as an important part of the political process. In the twentieth century, African Americans participated in spectacles despite disfranchisement, diminished economic opportunity, and the threat of lynching. With their presence and activism, they remained a visible and audible part of the public sphere, which resulted in financial improvement and political influence. At times, they exhibited dangerous behavior at political spectacles by harassing white politicians and confronting white women. Based on findings in newspapers and archives, this dissertation examines three case studies from Georgia, Louisiana, and Tennessee. From 1885 to 1898, black Atlanta and black Maconites played prominent roles in the local-option prohibition campaigns of the region despite increasingly hostile attitudes toward African Americans. In 1903, black musicians in New Orleans allied with their white colleagues to protest the exclusion of black talent from a reunion of Confederate veterans. In 1909, black bandleader W. C. Handy lent his talents to the mayoral campaign of Edward Hull Crump. During the campaign, Handy composed a song that launched both of their careers. In addition to these case studies, this dissertation consists of three broader chapters, which reveal black southerners performed similar behavior across the South. From 1877 to 1932, African Americans spoke at public rallies, generated enthusiasm with music, linked party politics to the memory of the Civil War, honored favorable candidates, and openly humiliated their opposition.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Hell fighters, black devils, and one wick-ed ma-an: how martial imagery in black popular culture helped define manhood during the World War I era
    (University of Alabama Libraries, 2013) Amron, Andrew David; Giggie, John Michael; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
    This dissertation explores the popularization of modern black masculinity during the World War I era. Focusing on mass media representations of black soldiers before, during, and after the war, it reveals a near-total popular culture saturation of aggressive and courageous imagery that black men increasingly used as a guide to confront racism, justify armed self-defense, and force local and federal governments to address black grievances. These martial representations in film, inexpensive artwork, black "histories" of the war, editorial cartoons, popular novels and poems, and in commemorative events featuring black soldiers provided a well-defined guide outlining the modern, masculine black man. Too often historians of the period focus on the "Talented Tenth," young, energetic middle-class African Americans, and the complications they experienced as they struggled to maintain respectability and redefine their gender and social standing in a rapidly modernizing world. Prior to World War I, the primary model for manly protest was through quiet petitions to government officials and the grudgingly passive acceptance of a racist society that might eventually bestow equality based on thrift and hard work. The war provided African Americans with a more forceful, but now domesticated model that encouraged assertiveness, and at times violence to secure full citizenship and civil rights based on the heroic actions of the black soldier.