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Afro-Americans in New York Life and History is an academic journal organized and distributed by Buffalo, New York's Afro-American Historical Association of the Niagara Frontier.
Founded in 1977, the journal's mission statement informs readers that its purpose is "to publish analytical, historical, and descriptive articles dealing with the life and history of Afro-Americans in New York State." [1] The Articles featured, deal with methodology and trends in local and regional African-American studies, historical and current. Additionally, documents are frequently published that have historical significance to the African-American in the state of New York, specifically. Finally, book reviews are published pertaining to aspects of the life, history, and culture of people of African descent and race relations. [2]
At the time of the journal's first publication, the success of Alex Haley's novel Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976) had created an immense, new found interest in the African-American community for the discovery, preservation, and presentation of the often-overlooked rich cultural heritage that African Americans had established in the United States.
The plight of African Americans in the United States in the 20th and 21st centuries can be connected to many different issues. The barriers of racism, economics and politics have greatly contributed to the oppression of people of color. These barriers continue to do so today. Whether purposefully or unknowingly actions in today's world due to these have left scars on society that have yet to heal. Afro-Americans in New York Life and History has played an important role in merging academic and community perspectives of African-American history and culture.
As of July 2013, Seneca Vaught, professor of history and African Studies at Kennesaw State University, is the journal's Editor, aided by Associate Editors Clarence Williams of CUNY, Lillian Williams of SUNY at Buffalo, and Oscar R. Williams of SUNY at Albany. A variety of scholars who are interested in furthering the field of African-American history serve as Contributing Editors.
In addition to Editorial supervision, the twenty-three-member board of directors that oversees the Afro-American Historical Association of the Niagara Frontier also has input into the operation and contents of the journal. [3]
The issues concerning this journal are aimed towards African Americans in New York, with prevalent issues brought to light and discussed in the volumes of Afro-Americans in New York Life and History. In 2005, the New York Historical Society held an exhibition titled Slavery in New York. An issue regarding Slavery in Albany, New York by Oscar Williams, Vol. 34, No. 2 (July 2010) emphasized that slavery was not limited to the south. In 1991, human remains by construction workers in lower Manhattan raised awareness of the African Burial Ground, where slaves in New York City were buried. Slavery was practiced into the 19th century. Most studies on slavery in New York have mentioned other New York cities sparingly. There is a failure on an understanding that slavery was widespread throughout New York. The capital, Albany, houses a special relationship of slavery beginning with the establishment of the Dutch West India Company in 1621.
Another issue arose in regards to African-American prisoners as passive citizens. Themis Chronopoulos' article "Political Power and Passive Citizenship: The Implications of Considering African American Prisoners as Residents of Rural New York State Districts" explains how African-American prisoners who used to live in New York City were transferred to a rural prison, which has had critical political implications. This movement of prisoners has allowed more conservative legislators to hold a political office. State law dictates that prisoners have no rights but are still being accounted for in the population. Consequently, these conservative legislators have been generally hostile in regards to African Americans and their interest. If it was not for the urban population of upstate New York, numerous senate districts would have to be redrawn due to a lack of number of residents. The Republican Party would not be able to dominate the New York State Senate and downstate New York would be more politically powerful. [4] [5]
The Carter G. Woodson essay contest is a scholarship awarded to students, ranging from grades 4–12, that show significant ability in writing. These essays are themed and students must be a resident from the western New York area. Cash prizes and certificates are presented to the winner. The winners' essays will be published in Historically Speaking and read at the African American History Program.
Niagara County is in the U.S. state of New York. As of the 2020 census, the population was 212,666. The county seat is Lockport. The county name is from the Iroquois word Onguiaahra; meaning the strait or thunder of waters.
Horace Greeley was an American newspaper editor and publisher who was the founder and editor of the New-York Tribune. Long active in politics, he served briefly as a congressman from New York, and was the unsuccessful candidate of the new Liberal Republican Party in the 1872 presidential election against incumbent President Ulysses S. Grant, who won by a landslide.
The Niagara Movement (NM) was a black civil rights organization founded in 1905 by a group of activists—many of whom were among the vanguard of African-American lawyers in the United States—led by W. E. B. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter. It was named for the "mighty current" of change the group wanted to effect and took Niagara Falls as its symbol. The group did not meet in Niagara Falls, New York, but planned its first conference for nearby Buffalo.
Upstate New York is a geographic region consisting of the area of New York State that lies north and northwest of the New York City metropolitan area. Although the precise boundary is debated, Upstate New York excludes New York City and Long Island, and most definitions of the region also exclude all or part of Westchester and Rockland counties, which are typically included in Downstate New York. Major cities across Upstate New York from east to west include Albany, Utica, Binghamton, Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo.
An African American is a citizen or resident of the United States who has origins in any of the black populations of Africa. African American-related topics include:
Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, was a historian, writer, collector, and activist. Schomburg was a Puerto Rican of African and German descent. He moved to the United States in 1891, where he researched and raised awareness of the contributions that Afro-Latin Americans and African Americans have made to society. He was an important intellectual figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Over the years, he collected literature, art, slave narratives, and other materials of African history, which were purchased to become the basis of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, named in his honor, at the New York Public Library (NYPL) branch in Harlem.
African-American history started with the arrival Africans to North America in the 16th and 17th centuries. Former Spanish slaves who had been freed by Francis Drake arrived aboard the Golden Hind at New Albion in California in 1579. The European colonization of the Americas, and the resulting transatlantic slave trade, led to a large-scale transportation of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic; of the roughly 10–12 million Africans who were sold by the Barbary slave trade, either to European slavery or to servitude in the Americas, approximately 388,000 landed in North America. After arriving in various European colonies in North America, the enslaved Africans were sold to white colonists, primarily to work on cash crop plantations. A group of enslaved Africans arrived in the English colony of Virginia in 1619, marking the beginning of slavery in the colonial history of the United States; by 1776, roughly 20% of the British North American population was of African descent, both free and enslaved.
The civil rights movement (1896–1954) was a long, primarily nonviolent action to bring full civil rights and equality under the law to all Americans. The era has had a lasting impact on American society – in its tactics, the increased social and legal acceptance of civil rights, and in its exposure of the prevalence and cost of racism.
John Henrik Clarke was an African-American historian, professor, prominent Afrocentrist, and pioneer in the creation of Pan-African and Africana studies and professional institutions in academia starting in the late 1960s.
George Washington Williams was a soldier in the American Civil War and in Mexico before becoming a Baptist minister, politician, lawyer, journalist, and writer on African-American history.
Ulrich Bonnell Phillips was an American historian who largely defined the field of the social and economic studies of the history of the Antebellum South and slavery in the U.S. Phillips concentrated on the large plantations that dominated the Southern economy, and he did not investigate the numerous small farmers who held few slaves. He concluded that plantation slavery produced great wealth, but was a dead end, economically, that left the South bypassed by the industrial revolution underway in the North.
Paul Finkelman is an American legal historian, the Robert E. and Susan T. Rydell Visiting Professor at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota, and a research affiliate at the Max and Tessie Zelikovitz Centre for Jewish Studies, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. He is the author or editor of more than 50 books on American legal and constitutional history, slavery, general American history and baseball. In addition, he has authored more than 200 scholarly articles on these and many other subjects. From 2017 - 2022, Finkelman served as the President and Chancellor of Gratz College, Melrose Park, Pennsylvania.
Buffalo is the county seat of Erie County, and the second most populous city in the U.S. state of New York, after New York City. Originating around 1789 as a small trading community inhabited by the Neutral Nation near the mouth of Buffalo Creek, the city, then a town, grew quickly after the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, with the city at its western terminus. Its position at the eastern end of Lake Erie strengthened the economy, based on grain milling and steel production along the southern shores and in nearby Lackawanna.
This is a selected bibliography of the main scholarly books and articles of Reconstruction, the period after the American Civil War, 1863–1877.
Cedric James Robinson was an American professor in the Department of Black Studies and the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). He headed the Department of Black Studies and the Department of Political Science and served as the Director of the Center for Black Studies Research. Robinson's areas of interest included classical and modern political philosophy, radical social theory in the African diaspora, comparative politics, racial capitalism, and the relationships between and among media and politics.
Abraham Lansing was an American lawyer and politician.
Gwendolyn Midlo Hall was an American historian who focused on the history of slavery in the Caribbean, Latin America, Louisiana, Africa, and the African Diaspora in the Americas. Discovering extensive French and Spanish colonial documents related to the slave trade in Louisiana, she wrote Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (1992), studied the ethnic origins of enslaved Africans brought to Louisiana, as well as the process of creolization, which created new cultures. She changed the way in which several related disciplines are researched and taught, adding to scholarly understanding of the diverse origins of cultures throughout the Americas.
James Campbell Matthews was an Albany, New York attorney and judge. He was notable as the first African American law school graduate in New York. He was elected a municipal judge in the late 1890s, which was the highest judicial office attained by an African-American up to that time.
William Barnes Sr. was an American attorney, author and government official from Albany, New York. He was an anti-slavery activist and a founder of the Republican Party. Barnes served as New York's first state Superintendent of Insurance, and held the office from 1860 to 1870. The works he authored included 1904's Semi-centennial of the Republican Party. He was the son-in-law of Thurlow Weed and the father of Catherine Weed Barnes and William Barnes Jr.
Abolitionist children’s literature includes works written for children by authors committed to the movement to end slavery. It aimed to instill in young readers an understanding of slavery, racial hierarchies, sympathy for the enslaved, and a desire for emancipation. A variety of literary forms were used by abolitionist children’s authors including, short stories, poems, songs, nursery rhymes and dialogues, much of it written by white women. Pamphlets, picture books and periodicals were the primary forms of abolitionist children’s literature, often using Biblical themes to reinforce the wickedness of slavery. Abolitionist children's literature was countered with pro-slavery material aimed at children, which attempting to depict slavery as a noble pursuit, and slaves as stupid and grateful, or evil.
