Browsing by Subject "Black Texans"
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Item Constructing place, building commuity : the archaeology and geography of African American freedmen's communities in central Texas(2016-05) Scott, Jannie Nicole; Franklin, Maria; Denbow, James; Luzzadder-Beach, Sheryl; Monroe, J. Cameron; Wilson, SamuelThis dissertation focuses on how African Americans residing in southern freedmen’s communities engaged with their institutional spaces, specifically educational and religious centers, between the years of 1870 and 1940. Using Antioch Colony, a freedmen’s community established in Hays County, Texas, as a case study I argue that Black Americans constructed their social institutions to enculturate members of the community into ideologies of self-help and reciprocal obligation. These ideologies were collectively believed to provide the best avenue for achieving equal rights, dismantling structural inequality, and combating anti-Black racism. Through a multidisciplinary study integrating methods of archaeological excavation, artifact analysis, archival information, and geographic information systems, I demonstrate how Black Americans used material culture and the built environment, as facilitated through their social institutions, to enact and reproduce such behaviors. In this manner, I engage with geographic theories of place to position social institutions as spaces produced to resist the dehumanization and subjugation of Black citizens in the postemancipation United States.Item Freedom's paradox : negotiating race and class in Jim Crow Texas(2014-08) Lee, Nedra K; Franklin, MariaThis dissertation focuses on black Texans and the entanglement of race and class during the Reconstruction and Jim Crow periods. I explore the role that landownership played in freedmen’s aspirations for citizenship and autonomy within the racially hostile South. Using the Ransom and Sarah William Farmstead, a historic freedmen’s site in Manchaca, Travis County, Texas, I posit that formerly enslaved blacks prioritized landownership not only to escape the sharecropping system but because property held significant symbolic capital. For blacks more than any other tangible possession, real estate signified a form of affluence that deeply influenced the social relations that black landowners had with others, regardless of race. Yet, while it made possible a certain level of socioeconomic and spatial mobility, black landowners simultaneously engendered suspicion and anger among whites. Using a critical race framework, I position black landowners as precariously perched between whites and landless blacks, as intermediaries who constantly (and carefully) had to negotiate a highly racialized, patriarchal, and class-based social world. Using ceramics, space and architecture, I present the realities of a more ambiguous and heterogeneous blackness where the Williamses variously accommodated and resisted dominant norms, and re-envisioned their place in a majority-white farming enclave. This dissertation complicates existing scholarship that either tends to flatten black experiences following emancipation by focusing on sharecropping, or to celebrate black landowners in Texas without seriously considering how racial hegemony still circumscribed their lives.