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Out of the Depths of Chattel Slavery in Maryland: A Look into the Archival Record of Frederick Douglass’s Maryland
No full textFrederick Augustus Washington Bailey, also known as Frederick Douglass, is arguably one of the most studied figures in the nineteenth century. His life in the public arena is well documented through public and private collections. This article examines how Frederick Bailey is documented in both public and private collections of records from the antebellum period. It also focuses on the preservation of the private family papers of Captain Aaron Anthony and the donation of the collection to the Maryland State Archives in the early 1960s. As with the personal papers of many slaveholding individuals, much of Douglass’s life in enslavement was recorded through the eyes of his master, Anthony. As 2018 marked the bicentennial of his birth, the state of Maryland celebrated his life and legacy. Archivists at the Maryland State Archives, the state’s official depository, worked to preserve and make accessible historical records of Douglass’s early life as documented in the public record. The Archives house government records of permanent value as well as private papers that document Douglass’s life as an enslaved individual
Putting Down the Steady Pen for the Natural World: Frederick Douglass’s Interplays with Mother Nature
No full textMuch of the scholarship on Frederick Douglass in the past twenty years has focused on his public contributions to society at large: numerous comprehensive biographical treatments detail his interactions with political, religious, civil, and social movements. However, there has been little discussion of his interactions with the natural world. This article explores Douglass as a man of many seasons who demonstrated over the course of his life many passions, nature being among the most prominent. Along with Douglass’s staunch commitment as a universal reformer, we argue, Douglass carried a lifelong love for the environment, engaging with it physically, intellectually, and as a source of leisure. By the time of his death, he had become a Victorian gentleman farmer and a naturalist who possessed a global understanding of his natural environment. In fact, he often merged his appreciation for nature with his broad range of activism. These actions worked in harmony with one another. This aspect of his life was an equally important aspect of his character as a man who came of age during the nineteenth century and whose soul departed from the earth on the eve of the twentieth century
Patrick Kelly’s “Mississippi Lisa”: Subverting Racial Kitsch with a T-Shirt
No full textThis article looks closely at one of Patrick Kelly’s T-shirt designs from his spring/summer 1989 ready-to-wear collection inspired by the Mona Lisa. Kelly’s “Mississippi Lisa” T-shirt design combines many of his inspirations and narrative experiences that inform his design process. The article explores how Kelly attempted to reclaim the trope of the mammy to redefine her meanings through an overtly camp yet kitsch aesthetic and interrogates what might be at stake in doing so
Monuments to the Impossible: A Cry, a Song, and a Sacrifice
No full textWhat tools do cultural interventions offer us to face and speak back to the horrors of a colonial archive that continues to grow and expand in its mechanisms of dehumanizing and silencing the populations it targets? How do we respond to a horizon of reality that seems surreal? What weapons do we have left to fight or speak back when we know that the walking and living archive—officers, policymakers, schoolteachers, corporate investors, and the people successfully disciplined by them—denies the lives of the people who tirelessly labor for it? Facts, research, and logical argument barely hold up against the almost surreal arsenal of deliberately woven lies and institutional racism we face. This article briefly analyzes three discrete responses linked by unfathomable horror, beauty, and anger (a song, a cry of rage, and a sacrificial act of self-assertion) to the horrors of anti-Black brutality
Place Making and Place Marking: On Kinship and Relatedness as Groundwork for the Strike for Freedom
No full textI encountered the film Strike for Freedom and the introduction to this special issue of Kalfou shortly before the 2019 winter break. It was perfect timing—just as I was traveling to Virginia to spend the holidays with my family members who are based in Charlottesville. There, the enshrinement of white supremacy is hard to ignore: the enduring effects of slavery unwilling to die are found quite literally at every turn. It is a landscape that remains difficult to traverse—requiring a constant reckoning with the social and spatial determinations of humanity for self and other. But the film directed by Parisa Urquhart (2019) and the introduction authored by Celeste-Marie Bernier and Nicole Willson (2020) reassured me of a continued and collaborative strike for freedom, in particular through the development of oppositional forms of place making and place marking. This occurs in a number of ways, including memory, history, testimony, and creative practice, to reinscribe the landscape, turning segregation into congregation, a process that works (as George Lipsitz makes clear in How Racism Takes Place) “to transform divisiveness into solidarity, to change dehumanization into rehumanization.”
I have thought a lot about congregation in particular—as it points to a necessary relatedness, to kinship in and through place, as the essential grounding for a continued strike for freedom, be it the relatedness of family for Frederick Douglass or for me in Charlottesville, or be it the scholarly and other forms of collaboration that bring us together in configurations of intellectual kinship that extend across different settings and platforms. To map these connections is to understand the interconnected threads of the freedom struggle, the footsteps that those before us took, the routes we now take, and the new constructs and practices of relatedness we develop
Commonwealth Forum: Should Pennsylvania Adopt a Citizens’ Redistricting Commission to Draw Congressional Districts?
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Gendered Pathways to Power: Identifying the Role of County Party Chairs in the Candidate Recruitment Process of Pennsylvania’s Local Elective Offices
Get PDFThe Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has historically fared poorly in terms of the proportion of women serving in its governing bodies. After a historic year of women in politics in 2018, Pennsylvania increased its proportion of women serving in the state legislature from 19% to 26%, which is still far from parity. Why are women so underrepresented? Political scientists have tested various variables: women’s lack of political ambition, negative gatekeeping by political parties, and gender stereotypes negatively impacting female candidates, just to name a few. This paper focuses on the role that county party chairs and vice-chairs play in recruiting female candidates to run for political office in Pennsylvania. In this article I ask: what do the recruitment efforts look like on the ground and how are the recruitment efforts gendered? In terms of recruitment efforts, I expect the stronger county party to have its leaders pull from informal networks that are extensions of the party leaders themselves. On the other hand, I expect weak county parties to cast a wide net for candidate recruitment and allow candidates to self-identify, which I call the “volunteer” model. I use interview data of county party chairs in order to understand the structure of candidate recruitment in Pennsylvania and the impact it may have on candidate selection
Wave or Trend: Female Candidates in Pennsylvania Elections in the Trump Era
Get PDFThe 2018 elections saw a record number of women running for elected office in the United States and in Pennsylvania, but whether this represents a temporary wave or a lasting trend is not clear. Using a combination of survey data; interviews of new candidates, elected officeholders, and party officials; and election data, this study examines the gender equality gains of 2018 in Pennsylvania’s legislature in historical and political context. The data provide evidence that formal recruitment of female candidates was common (but not universal), that the number of women running for and winning office increased by historic (and not just significant) levels, and that a persistent and consistent motivation was discernible in large portions of the candidate body. Survey measures of female candidate persistence—whether they plan to run again or recruit new candidates—also indicate that women intend to remain similarly active after the 2018 election cycle has come and gone
James McCune Smith Predicted African American Preeminence in U.S. Art and Culture
No full textJames McCune Smith (1813–1865) was an African American physician, author, intellectual, community leader, and antislavery activist. He believed that the racial caste system of the United States was perpetuated not only by the slave system but by widely entrenched negative attitudes towards people of African descent, both outside and within the African American community. To counteract popular prejudice and to promote African American confidence and unity, he wrote widely on the abilities, accomplishments, and contributions of people of African descent, both historical and contemporary. This article examines McCune Smith’s theory that African Americans would play a formative and outsize role in the development of United States artistic and intellectual culture. From his time to ours, McCune Smith’s striking prediction was fulfilled to a degree that even he, inspired with the confidence his 1841 lecture “The Destiny of the People of Color” (published 1843) reveals, might marvel at