Episode 33 – Jim Crow and the Rise of Black Culture

Ma Rainey – Good Housekeeping 1923.

After a week off we return to our special series in honor of Black History Month. This time we discuss the two primary ways Black men and women have been characterized by white Americans for well over one hundred years: objects of desire and entertainment and subjects of scorn and suspicion. In the face of this stereotyping Black culture has responded, often quite opening, by exposing the white gaze and the inherent hypocrisy of Jim Crow. Along the way we discuss Ida Wells, Ma Rainey, Louis Armstrong, Jimi Hendrix, Collin Kaepernick, and Donald Glover.

Episode 32 – The Rise of Abolitionism – Black History from 1776 to 1860

Douglass argued against John Brown’s plan to attack the arsenal at Harpers Ferry – Jacob Lawrence, https://catalog.archives.gov/id/559102.

Join us for Part 2 of our series for Black History Month. We discuss the nation’s founding documents and the ways slavery was and was not addressed in each. We also discuss early abolitionists like Sojourner Truth and her connections to the Second Great Awakening, a period of religious revivalism, and William Lloyd Garrison. We also discuss the oppositional approaches towards ending slavery adopted by Nat Turner and Frederick Douglass. Finally, we discuss the unlikely friendship of Douglass and John Brown, the man hanged for his attack on the Federal Arsenal at Harper’s Ferry.

Episode 31 – The First Africans in America – Black History to 1775

An Abstract of Evidence delivered before a select committee of the House of Commons in 1790 and 1791, reprinted in Phyllis M. Martin and Patrick O’Meara (eds.) (1995). Africa third edition. Indiana University Press and James Currey. ISBN 0253209846 and ISBN 0852552300. Page 119, plate 22. Photo courtesy of the Lilly Library of Rare Books and Manuscripts, Indiana University.

Join us in the first of a four-part series delving into the complicated and often contentious history of African Americans. In this first part we cover the transition from indentured servitude to slavery. We also cover the emergence of the “Middle Passage” and the creation and eventual hardening of racial divisions in the British colonies, most notably Virginia. We introduce you to Estavanico the Moor, an early explorer in the Southwestern US, Antony Johnson a former slave turned slave owner who is posthumously deprived of the right to own property, and the thousands of Africans who perished in the figurative and literal death of forcibly being transported across the Atlantic in the 18th century.