LibGuides: Black History: Credo Reference

African Americans

Topic Page: African Americans African Americans are a people whose ancestors are from Africa. Although there are obvious mixtures among African Americans, the dominant ancestry of the people is from Africa. African Americans first used this term to define themselves, but for various reasons they have also used terms such as Negro, Colored, Afro-American, and Black at various times in their history. The most frequently used terms now are African American and Black, which are used interchangeably. The term African by itself is, to a lesser extent, used interchangeably with African American and Black by more culturally conscious African Americans.

Slavery

Topic Page: Slavery The enforced servitude of one person (a slave) to another or one group to another. A slave has no personal rights and is considered the property of another person through birth, purchase, or capture. Slavery goes back to prehistoric times; it flourished in classical times, but declined in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. During the imperialistic eras of Spain, Portugal, and Britain in the 16th to 18th centuries, and in the American South in the 17th to 19th centuries, slavery became a mainstay of an agricultural labour-intensive economy, with millions of Africans sold to work on plantations in North and South America. Millions more died during transportation, but the profits from this trade were enormous.

Abolition Movement

Topic Page: Abolition Movement A movement culminating in the late 18th and early 19th centuries that aimed first to end the slave trade, and then to abolish the institution of slavery and emancipate slaves. The movement took place in Europe, mainly in the UK, and in the USA.

Underground Railroad

Topic Page: Underground Railroad in U.S. history, loosely organized system for helping fugitive slaves escape to Canada or to areas of safety in free states. It was run by local groups of Northern abolitionists, both white and free blacks. The metaphor first appeared in print in the early 1840s, and other railroad terminology was soon added. The escaping slaves were called passengers; the homes where they were sheltered, stations; and those who guided them, conductors. This nomenclature, along with the numerous, somewhat glorified, personal reminiscences written by conductors in the postwar period, created the impression that the Underground Railroad was a highly systematized, national, secret organization that accomplished prodigious feats in stealing slaves away from the South. In fact, most of the help given to fugitive slaves on their varied routes north was spontaneously offered and came not only from abolitionists or self-styled members of the Underground Railroad, but from anyone moved to sympathy by the plight of the runaway slave before his eyes.

Emancipation Proclamation

Topic Page: Emancipation Proclamation In the early part of the Civil War, President Lincoln refrained from issuing an edict freeing the slaves despite the insistent urgings of abolitionists. Believing that the war was being fought solely to preserve the Union, he sought to avoid alienating the slaveholding border states that had remained in the Union. "If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could do it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that."

Civil Rights Movements (United States)

Topic Page: Civil rights movements (United States) The civil rights movement was a struggle to fulfill the promise, made in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, of full citizenship and equal opportunity for African Americans. It originated with those amendments (in fact, one could say, with the earliest African Americans) and more particularly with the decline in commitment to those amendments that the rise of segregation and disfranchisement embodied by the early twentieth century. Thus, though it came to a climax in the first half of the 1960s, it began long before the 1950s. The civil rights movement was a response to the Jim Crow era—the era of state-sponsored segregation, disfranchisement, and discrimination—which it sought to eradicate.

Ku Klux Klan

Topic Page: Ku Klux Klan The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) has been reborn three separate times in the course of American history and exists today as a scattering of competing far-right organizations under different leadership and somewhat different ideologies. The first KKK was created in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1866 by ex-Confederate officers as a kind of white supremacist, fraternal organization, with its name coming from the Greek word kuklos, meaning “circle.”

Black Panther Party

Topic Page: Black Panther Party U.S. African-American militant party, founded (1966) in Oakland, Calif., by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. Originally aimed at armed self-defense against the local police, the party grew to espouse violent revolution as the only means of achieving black liberation. The Black Panthers called on African Americans to arm themselves for the liberation struggle. In the late 1960s party members became involved in a series of violent confrontations with the police (resulting in deaths on both sides) and in a series of court cases, some resulting from direct shoot-outs with the police and some from independent charges.

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

Topic Page: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), organization composed mainly of American blacks, but with many white members, whose goal is the end of racial discrimination and segregation.

Desegregation

Topic Page: Desegregation The process of ending separation or isolation of a group who were restricted by law or custom to separate living areas, public facilities, educational institutions, etc. Desegregation often refers to this process in the context of black Americans. (See civil-rights movement.)

Harlem Renaissance

Topic Page: Harlem Renaissance The Harlem Renaissance was the cultural front of the New Negro movement heralded by privileged intellectual leaders during the 1920s. It was also a marker of drastic demographic change with huge political implications, and the historical occasion in which African America's expressive tendencies took on an urban cast. More broadly the Harlem Renaissance was an inspiration for, and a manifestation of, the worldwide Négritude movement which grew out of, and in some quarters superseded, Pan-Africanist thought. Though difficult to date precisely since its sources and effects were both subtle and profound, the creative flowering that centered in a relatively small corner of New York City is generally thought to have begun with the armistice that brought an end to World War I and to have declined when financial support for the arts dried up during the Great Depression.

Blues (Music)

Topic Page: Blues (Music) African-American music that originated in the work songs and Negro spirituals of the rural American South in the late 19th century. It is usually of a slow to moderate speed and characteristic features include a 12-bar (sometimes 8-bar or 16-bar) construction and a syncopated melody line that often includes ‘blue notes’ (quarter tones lying between the minor and major third of the scale – as found on some African five-note xylophones – or between the minor and major seventh). The lyrics are melancholy and tell tales of woe or unhappy love. The guitar is the main instrument, although the harmonica and piano are also common. Blues guitar and vocal styles have played a vital part in the development of jazz, rock, and pop music in general.

Jazz

Topic Page: Jazz The sociocultural seeds of jazz came from West Africa, penetrating and developing in the European American soil of the New World. Jazz is, therefore, a “creole” music. Creole in this case refers to a process in which there is a mixture of elements used in creating a new thing that somehow retains characteristics of its origins while preserving its new identity. It may favor first one and then another of its parents but it must somehow maintain a balance of its elements or it reverts to a more fundamental form. Throughout the history of jazz there has been evidence of this dynamic tension, a struggle between its European and African roots that mirrored a comparable struggle in the broader American culture.

Rap (music)

Topic Page: Rap (music) Rap music is a central feature of hip hop culture, comprising just one of hip hop’s four basic elements: graffiti, break dancing, DJing and rapping (or MCing). First appearing in New York City’s Bronx neighborhoods in the late 1970s, hip hop began as a youth-oriented, working-class and largely Black American urban cultural movement. Since its inception, rap music has served as hip hop’s most culturally recognized and commercially successfully component.

Douglass, Frederick, 1818-1895

Topic Page: Frederick Douglass Frederick Douglass, author of a profoundly influential African American text during his era, rose through the ranks of the antislavery movement to become the most electrifying speaker and compelling writer produced by black America in the nineteenth century. Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was born on Maryland's Eastern Shore in February 1818, the son of Harriet Bailey, a slave, and an unknown white man. Sent to Baltimore in 1826 by his master's son-in-law Thomas Auld, Frederick spent five years as a servant in the home of Thomas Auld's brother Hugh. Hugh's wife, Sophia, treated the slave boy with unusual kindness, giving him reading lessons until her husband forbade them. Rather than accept Hugh Auld's dictates, Frederick took his first rebellious steps toward freedom by teaching himself to read and write.

Tubman, Harriet, 1821-1913

Topic Page: Harriett Tubman As an abolitionist and suffragist, Harriet Tubman participated in the major reform movements of mid-nineteenth-century America. Despite having never held political office, Tubman became well known in the United States for her work with the Underground Railroad and often was described as the "Moses of her people."

Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt) (Feb 23, 1868 - Aug 27, 1963)

Topic Page: Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt) (Feb 23, 1868 - Aug 27, 1963) William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was a visionary, strategic organizer, and prolific writer who tirelessly advocated, and often agitated, for racial, economic, and gender equality as well as peace with social justice.

King, Martin Luther, Jr. (1929 - 1968)

Topic Page: King, Martin Luther, Jr. (1929 - 1968) The son and grandson of prominent African American ministers, each of whom bequeathed a legacy of activism in the cause of black civil rights, Martin Luther King, Jr., born on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia, was the most influential leader of the American civil rights movement. By the end of his brief life he had also emerged as an unsparing critic of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and a champion of America's poor of all colors. Throughout his life, King remained committed to nonviolent direct action as a means of effecting social change.

Marshall, Thurgood (1908 - 1993)

Topic Page: Marshall, Thurgood (1908 - 1993) US jurist and civil-rights leader. As a prominent civil-rights lawyer, he frequently presided over landmark cases such as Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Marshall was named director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Legal Defense and Education Fund in 1940. He was named to the US Court of Appeals in 1961 and served as solicitor general 1965–67. In 1967 President Johnson appointed him to the US Supreme Court, a post he held until 1991. The first black Supreme Court justice, Marshall was a strong voice for civil and individual rights throughout his career.

Carmichael, Stokely (1941 - 1998)

Topic Page: Carmichael, Stokely (1941 - 1998) Stokely Carmichael, also known as Kwame Ture, was an activist during the civil rights movement. He was a leader in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and later joined the Black Panther Party. He is also known for coining the term “black power.”

Malcolm X (1925 - 1965)

Topic Page: Malcolm X (1925 - 1965) One of twentieth-century America's most controversial black leaders, Malcolm X was critical of nonviolence as a tactic, and he advocated armed resistance to white racism. Often regarded as a radical opposite to Martin Luther King, Jr., he had a following that was almost entirely urban and Northern. Malcolm X insisted on high moral standards from his followers. Born Malcolm Little on May 19, 1925, in Omaha, Nebraska, he spent much of his youth in Massachusetts, where he first became aware of class differences between African Americans. His teenage years were dominated by petty crime, and in 1946 Malcolm was imprisoned for burglary. There Malcolm converted to the Nation of Islam (NOI), led by the charismatic and enigmatic Elijah Muhammad, who convinced Malcolm that his imprisonment was the fault of white society. This would become a cornerstone of Malcolm's philosophy.

Hughes, Langston, 1902-1967

Topic Page: Hughes, Langston, 1902-1967 James Langston Hughes was an outstanding African American poet who relentlessly fought against racial segregation and significantly contributed to strengthening black consciousness and racial pride among the black people in America, particularly through the Harlem Renaissance. Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, in 1902. His parents separated shortly after his birth, his father eventually moving to Mexico, ostensibly driven by the contempt he had developed for African Americans whom he saw as having accepted their deprived state in the racially segregated America. Hughes spent his early childhood with his maternal grandmother in Lawrence, Kansas. It was an altogether lonely and unhappy life. But the caring and inspiring nature of his grandmother, a political activist in her own right, and the love he cultivated for books and reading, made it bearable. After 1914, he lived with his mother in Lincoln, Illinois, and then Cleveland, Ohio.

Baldwin, James, 1924-1987

Topic Page: Baldwin, James, 1924-1987 James Baldwin's career illustrates the difficulties American authors face balancing their public and private lives. The tension between these lives accounts for the dominant pattern in Baldwin's life: at one moment he would vociferate about the failures and contradictions of the American experience, and at the next he would be in exile from his native country, writing or simply escaping the public eye in Europe or Turkey. Baldwin's works, nearly evenly divided between fiction and nonfiction, also reflect his intense devotion to public causes and his need for privacy.

Morrison, Toni (1931 - )

Topic Page: Morrison, Toni (1931 - ) Toni Morrison is one of the most lauded and recognized writers in the English language. An accomplished novelist, essayist, playwright, and librettist, Morrison’s work is distinguished by her stunningly beautiful use of language and her chronicling of the African American experience through folklore, gender issues, and the human condition. Her illustrious contributions to American letters have earned her numerous honors and have located her among the very best in the field of literature and great thinkers.

Holiday, Billie, 1915-1959

Topic Page: Holiday, Billie, 1915-1959 In 1958, Frank Sinatra declared that Billie Holiday was “unquestionably the most important influence on American popular singing in the last twenty years” (Clarke 2000). Fast-forward to the twenty-first century, and Holiday's impact on American music seems even more profound. She has influenced the likes of Lena Horne, Tori Amos, Sarah Vaughan, Cassandra Wilson, Kate Bush, Tina Turner, Natalie Merchant, Macy Gray, Joan Osborne, Amy Winehouse, Joni Mitchell, Norah Jones, and Beyoncé.

Credo Reference Books

African American almanac : 400 years of triumph, courage and excellence by Lean'tin L. Bracks The most complete and affordable single-volume reference of African American culture available today, this almanac is a unique and valuable resource devoted to illustrating and demystifying the moving, difficult, and often lost history of black life in America.
ISBN: 9781784023652
Publication Date: 2014
Encyclopedia of Emancipation and Abolition in the Transatlantic World by Junius Rodriguez
ISBN: 9781849725149
Publication Date: 2009-10-05
Freedom Facts and Firsts: 400 years of the African American civil rights experience by Jessie Carney Smith; Linda T. Wynn Spanning nearly 400 years from the early abolitionists to the present, this guide book profiles people, places, and events that have shaped the history of the black struggle for freedom.
ISBN: 9781578592432
Publication Date: 2009-01-01
Ripples of Hope: great American civil rights speeches by Josh Gottheimer (Editor); Bill Clinton (Editor); Mary Frances Berry (Editor) Including a never-before published speech by Martin Luther King, Jr., this is the first compilation of its kind, bringing together the most influential and important voices from two hundred years of America's struggle for civil rights, including essential speeches from leaders, both famous and obscure.
ISBN: 9781849724173
Publication Date: 2009-05-19
The Underground Railroad: an encyclopedia of people, places, and operations by Mary Ellen Snodgrass Includes full coverage of the Railroad in both the United States and Canada, which was the ultimate destination of many of the escaping slaves. Explores the people, places, writings, laws, and organizations that made this network possible.
ISBN: 9781849725163
Publication Date: 2009-10-05