What if you made it to an urban "promised land" and had nowhere decent to live? For African Americans in 1940s Los Angeles, housing was a major problem and focus of political activity. WWII caused the African American population in Los Angeles to surge throughout the 1940s, placing severe stress on a restricted housing market. This study investigates black housing politics in the 1940s in South Los Angeles, along with the ideological formation of race restrictive covenants. It was observed that black women played a central role in the mobilization of community resources to combat segregation and poor housing conditions. Black activism around housing issues was shared between a cross-section of civic, religious, and labor groups, with particular focus on black news media. Furthermore, residential segregation was identified not as an inherent pathology of racism, but as a deliberate practice to construct white ideals of residential space, and hence white identity itself.

In 1604, during an age when poetry wielded power in the public sphere as political critique and social commentary, Shakespeare introduced onto the London stage his “noble Moor” as the hero of a tragedy. A heretofore demonized and lampooned creature of English Renaissance drama – “the blackamoor” – was suddenly rendered as a sympathetic and suffering, sentient human being: an honorable man cruelly victimized for nothing more than racist spite. That moment of empathy when the Englishman could weep openly for a black African as if for he himself was the birth of a modern Western consciousness of a shared human condition that could transcend race. It was a moment of unprecedented commensurability when the Western gaze saw itself reflected in the other – and his name was Othello.

In The Biography of Othello, Susan Solt demonstrates that in a gesture of extraordinary affinity during a rare window of cultural tolerance, Shakespeare used his play about an interracial marriage to make a case for racial understanding. From that moment forward, Othello, the African prince captured into slavery who rose as a free man to command the military forces of sixteenth-century Venice, would forever be enshrined as the signifying counterpoint to the prevailing Western construct of the brute African slave.

Providing the reader with a massively researched study of Othello’s life imagined in its historical context, Solt achieves nothing less than a re-write of the master narrative that reframes the underreported African presence in world history – especially in Shakespeare’s London. She critically examines what occurred when black people and white people first interacted in the intersection of cultures in the early modern world, and uncovers overlooked antecedents to America’s historical struggle with race and racism and the stain of slavery on our national character. In Susan Solt’s reading of the play, the figure of Othello is a vector for the transformative role the construction of race plays in the forces of history, which explains why a work of literature written so long ago still speaks to us today.

Although crafted on a matrix of scholarship, The Biography of Othello is not a typical history book, it is not just another book about Shakespeare – it is about us; it is about our shared cultural identity across the spectrum of human difference. Watching or reading Othello today is to live 400 years of race in Western civilization. Through transforming Othello’s fictional story into a historically-based cultural biography, Susan Solt gives face, voice, and agency to the racial other. The intimate other. The man inside Shakespeare’s storied construct. For it is through the intimacy of this encounter with Othello that we can also seek to know ourselves – our own otherness – and our own privilege.

This thesis employs the theory of intersectionality to broaden our understanding of the social construction of race. To do so, the thesis explicates a 1806 Virginia Supreme Court decision, Hudgins v. Wright, to illustrate how race is intersectionally constituted. I employ the term "intra-categorical intersectionality" to describe this dynamic. By intra-categorical intersectionality I mean to the process by which a number of factors intersect to construct race. First, the thesis discusses both Crenshaw's 1989 article on the theory of intersectionality, and Ian F. Haney Lopez's 1994 article on the Social Construction of Race in its Theoretical Framework section. The thesis then provides some background on Virginia during the early eighteenth and nineteenth century as a predicate to explicating Hudgins v Wrights to reveal how the court's opinion reflects an intra-categorical intersectional approach. In the context of doing so, the thesis demonstrates how skin-color, hair texture, performance, family lineage, white witnesses testimony, reputation, judges' personal views on slavery, and gender intersect to determine race.

This dissertation examines the multiple and myriad ways White women living in nineteenth-century New York sought to extend the logics of enslavement into the state’s post-emancipation era, and the diverse methods Black New Yorkers utilized to fight back. It tracks the period from the culmination of New York’s gradual emancipation act in 1827 through the American Civil War. Toggling between New York City and the larger state, this work argues that White women utilized the law, enforcing some, while ignoring others, to actively control, discipline, and harm the region’s Black communities. In doing so, these women frequently reinforced the period’s prevailing notions and privileges of White womanhood. As bondholders, White women exploited the legalized system of indenture in order to continue the same cruelty and surveillance that had flourished under New York slavery. Later, as the state introduced new legislation to begin construction of the first women’s prison at Sing Sing, an act rooted in White fears about Black unfitness for freedom, White women embraced their positions as matrons, inflicting rigid and violent forms of discipline on incarcerated Black women. Still other women continued their involvement in the legal and illicit slave trade well into the 1860s, perpetuating the system of enslavement in its most tangible form. Finally, in 1863, White female New Yorkers, alongside their male counterparts, wreaked brutal financial and physical violence on the city’s Black community in protest to the first federal conscription act. In the months following, White women would marshall the courts to their advantage, evading accountability for their vicious acts. Still, at every turn, New York’s Black men and women challenged these attacks on their lives, families and livelihoods. Through self- and community aided emancipation, carving out space for laughter, beauty, and joy, and by contesting the claims of White women to assert control over their families, finances, and lives, Black New Yorkers demonstrated the limits of White women’s power. In doing so, this analysis encourages scholars to reorient our understanding of the diverse gendered manifestations of slavery’s afterlives, shifting our focus both northward and backwards in time.

History notes the strivings forged during the American Revolution by many nineteenth century black founding fathers in pursuit of community and liberation. Central to the narrative of freedom is the creation of black religion during the Second Great Awakening leading to independent black churches. Yet, often absent is the narrative of the black founding mothers. Black women confronted and outmaneuvered the double oppression of race and gender. Theologian James H. Cone’s, A Black Theology of Liberation utilizes a masculine framework to analyze the black experience in America, thus negating black women. This research asserts, Jarena Lee and Maria W. Stewart two nineteenth century proto-feminist pioneers of socio-religious justice radically challenged the sexist ideology of black male leadership. Rather than accepting Cone’s idea of liberation, this research will examine the full mirror theory of liberation in the lives of the founding mothers elucidating how they found freedom in religion.

"The Criminalization of Black Angeleno Women" illuminates what happened in early 20th century Los Angeles when African American women, particularly working poor females, came into contact with the Los Angeles Police Department, the court system and the local, mainstream media. Individually, but especially collaboratively, these institutions lead to the overrepresentation of Black, statistically and in the public mind, in the local sex trade. Essentially, this thesis traces the biases of the criminal justice system that labeled Black women as criminals and prostitutes in Los Angeles. The study focuses on the years 1928 to 1938 in Los Angeles, but has broad implications of a national phenomenon that was longstanding.

In 1854, Charlotte Forten, a free teenager of color from Philadelphia, was sent by her family to Salem, Massachusetts. She was fifteen years old. Charlotte was relocated to obtain an education worthy of the teenager’s socio-elite background. The 1850 Fugitive Slave Law had a tremendous impact on her family in the City of Brotherly Love. Even though they were well-known and affluent citizens and abolitionists, the law’s passage took a heavy toll on all people of color in the North including rising racial tensions, mob attacks, and the acute possibility of kidnap. Charlotte Forten: Coming of Age as a Radical Teenage Abolitionist is an intellectual biography that spans her teenage years from 1854-1856. Scholarship has maintained that Charlotte was sent to Salem solely as a result of few educational opportunities in Philadelphia. Reexamining the diary she kept as a teenager in Salem reveals that there was more to the story. Her family’s extensive ties to the Underground Railroad, anti-slavery endeavors, and lack of male guardianship for her in Philadelphia also factored in to the family’s decision to send her to Salem. It was not just the pursuit of a better education, but also for personal protection.

Once in Salem, Charlotte lived with famous abolitionist Charles Lenox Remond and his new wife, Amy Matilda Remond. Both were actively involved in New England anti-slavery and were aligned with the ideology of William Lloyd Garrison’s fiery brand of abolition. Charlotte began her education as a student, becoming the first to integrate the Higginson Grammar School, as well as having started her training as a Garrisonian abolitionist. She began keeping a diary at the exact moment that Boston was bearing witness to the capture, trial, and conviction of former fugitives because of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. This planted the seed in the teenager, and she grew to become a radical abolitionist in Salem, all the while documenting in real time what she witnessed and experienced. There do not appear to be any other surviving documents by a free teenager of color during the antebellum period who extensively recorded the national politics and the impending crisis over slavery. Charlotte declared in her diary, “I crave anti-slavery food continually!” and when she was not pursuing a higher education, she dedicated the majority of her time to anti-slavery causes, events, fairs, meetings, lectures, and sermons.