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The article focuses on the legal and illegal activities of Walter R. Clark who was a sheriff and politician in Broward Country, Florida. It discusses his role in organized crime activities involving illegal gambling, illegal arrests, and racist violence. The difference between U.S. sheriffs and police chiefs, convict leasing, and the circumstances surrounding the election of Clark as sheriff in 1932 are also mentioned.

This paper proffers an Afromodern analysis of black liberation, embodied in the Black Lives Matter movement. In doing so, it revisits the historical concept of barbarism as a critical modality for human silencing, in order to make sense of anti-black racism in our extant social order and its re-articulation through systematic discourses of black criminality. The essay explores two dialectically opposing modernities as having differentiated effects on the construction of the human being. Euromodernity barbarizes the black subject as a carceral being, absent political speech. Afromodernity, contrastingly, fashions the black subject as a communicative being endowed with political speech and as such, black politics becomes not a relic of barbarism, but in lieu, embodies a modern re-enactment of political society. The paper concludes that Black Lives Matter functions as an Afromodern displacement of Euromodern anti-black racism by contesting American democracy as a carceral apparatus to ensure a democratic revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the article, the authors discuss how automated stategraft or the use of technology by governments to siphon financial resources from vulnerable groups under the guise of law enforcement is allegedly causing economic predation of African American communities in the U.S. An example is the use of the National Highway Safety Transportation Administration of automated traffic enforcement systems. Also cited is the need to impose just traffic enforcement practices focusing on trust.

The article discusses the role of minstrelsy and humor in how African Americans were portrayed the Macon, Georgia, newspapers the "Georgia Telegraph" and the "Georgia Citizen." It examines broad stereotypes of the perceived ignorance of African Americans that were printed in the newspapers, and the parallel popularity of minstrel shows that reinforced the institution of slavery and propagated white supremacy.

Over-use of force by law enforcement officers in the United States persists, along with a resulting state of crisis in Black communities. Massive protests in 2020-2021 calling for racial justice and for law enforcement reform have seemingly not been effective in turning the page on disproportionate use of force in interactions with Black civilians. Meanwhile, as protests and calls for legislative action and policy change continue, police training continues. Studies show that traditional Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) training practices produce resentment and resistance, specifically in the context of law enforcement. The Authors-scholars of law, critical race and gender studies, and engineering-have taken a multidisciplinary-team problem-solving approach to the crisis, with a focus on police training. The Authors launched a project, funded by a grant from The Ohio State University's Seed Fund for Racial Justice, that seeks to intervene in traditional DEI training at the Columbus Division of Police. With the aim of developing an innovative software program that augments in-person police training related to DEI, the project's methodology includes using real-life policing scenarios, software design, site visits, and engagement by students in the "Antiracist Technology" engineering course at The Ohio State University. The project reflects a collaborative focus on negotiation and critical race and gender studies. The Authors seek to explore how technology can enhance in-person instructional training related to DEI and cultural competency while simultaneously reducing resistance to and resentment of DEI training. Ultimately, the goal is to use technology, together with research on structural and institutional systems of oppression, to improve relations between law enforcement and Black civilians. This Article will first describe the problem the Authors' project seeks to address and its multidisciplinary problem-solving approach. It will then provide a critical overview of the research this project builds from and outline the project methodology. Finally, the Authors share about related research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the legal and historical origins of black jail debt peonage, which emerged in the aftermath of the Nat Turner rebellion in 1831, when Virginia enacted stricter laws to control and punish African American population. Topics discussed include difference between debt peonage and enslavement, a quantitative analysis of the Richmond city sergeant jail register from 1841 to 1846, and background on the practice of hiring out free Black Virginians to pay a jail debt.

The article explores the potential impact of drug decriminalization and gun criminalization on the African American population with regard to racial justice issues in the U.S. Topics discussed include the history and enforcement of drug laws in the country, the prosecution and conviction of African Americans for drug offenses, and the way gun control measures may help promote safer interactions between law enforcement personnel and African Americans.

As U.S. imperialism expanded during the twentieth century, the modern national security state came into being and became a major force in the suppression of Black dissent. This Article reexamines the modern history of civil liberties law and policy and contends that Black Americans have historically had uneven access to the right to freedom of speech in the United States. Through archival research and legal analysis, I conduct four case studies that are representative of key trends in Black dissent after World War II: Black Communism, the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power movement, and the Movement for Black Lives. These case studies illustrate how the modern national security state has affected the First Amendment right to freedom of speech and managed Black dissent in the United States, particularly when such speech is anti-imperialist or anticapitalist. I argue that the modern national security state is one of the power structures undergirding free-speech jurisprudence. It operates in concert with free-speech colorblindness, a phenomenon I track in the final Part of this Article, to suppress domestic dissent by subordinated racial groups. The case studies suggest that the practical consequence of freespeech colorblindness is the narrowing of speech rights for Black dissenters and the overall containment of Black dissent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explains why discrimination against black hair is considered as race discrimination under title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Also cited are the alleged sustained structural racism in the U.S., the appeals to federal courts to include hair discrimination in the definition of race discrimination, and why discrimination against African American hairstyles is a discrimination against African American culture.

Earl Wright's most recent book I Jim Crow Sociology i builds on his long-standing scholarship examining Black sociology at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and the history of American sociology (e.g., Wright [8], [9], [10]). I Jim Crow Sociology i should resonate with many I Rural Sociology i readers as Wright provides an examination of Black sociology and contextualizes its historical exclusion within processes of scholarly marginalization. More than an historical recounting, Wright situates his analysis within the development of Black sociology and critically engages its marginalization within American sociology. [Extracted from the article]

Black trans life has recently taken center stage in the liberal mind. The machine of diversity, equity, and inclusion has increased visibility of Black transness in a variety of arenas. We are now seen on red carpets, earn book deals, and play prominent roles in television shows and films. Yet the potential for our violation remains constitutive of our embodiments as we are coerced to interact with the World. As these co-constitutive inclusions and violations indicate, the affectual theatre of progress for Black trans people is in full swing. The embrace of impossibility may be the heftiest tool for legal scholars analyzing this paradoxical regime. How might the impossibility of Black vitality within U.S. juridical order lead us to a legal scholarship that insists on law's abandonment, toward a legal scholarship that properly situates the discourse of queer and trans rights in the hold of the ship, in the afterlife of slavery? Here the impositions of this impossibility take center stage, pushing beyond legal scholarship's deathridden love affair with political pragmatism, its retention of the nation state and, to quote Anthony Farley, its unanswered "prayers for freedom." This work primarily serves as a reflection of what reckoning with the figure of the human as an imposition on Black queer/trans vitality in legal discoursemay look like. I interrogate the historical progression of queer humanist legal changes, arriving at the careful and particular creation of a queer subject for whom human being is a possibility--particularly examining Lawrence v. Texas and Obergefell v. Hodges. My reading of Lawrence v. Texas examines the unfolding of the legal ideology of the queer human, centering the horrifying slippage between queer desire and black ontological precarity as a necessary tool for the establishment of queer personhood via gay rights. Lawrence evidences the piecemeal process of creating state-worthy subjectivities, attending to the deathliness of queer sex by trapping it within the already established rubrics of monogamous home-oriented structures of sexual/romantic relations. Following that, Obergefell v. Hodges opens up the workings of legal precedent and the principle of harm, revealing the saliency of the human to their proper function. Here the piecemeal project continues, necessitating marriage to create vitality for the queer family. Finally, Bostock v. Clayton caps off the queer humanist project by attending to the queer worker and setting the stage for a trans inclusive humanist project by interrogating gender and queer corporeality. Through the conundrums exposed in these cases, this study presents, for scholars of the law, a fruitful call to reorient ourselves toward a critical analysis of U.S. juridical order that has no bounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the article, the author discusses an instructional resource for high school students and preservice art educators that focuses on the emancipation history of Maryland. Other topics include how commemorative art influences historical memory and how visual and material culture both illuminated and obscured freedom narratives for African Americans by citing the works "Freedmen Memorial" by Thomas Ball and Joan Gaither's "Sesquicentennial 1864 Maryland Slave Emancipation Quilt."

When insurrectionists stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, they were continuing a tradition of white Americans figuring themselves as victims, a narrative whose connection to the American Revolution would be crystalized in The 1776 Report , released just days later. This article argues that responsible teaching of Phillis Wheatley's poetry can reframe for contemporary students their understanding of the Revolutionary period, of African Americans' role in the nation, and of crucial issues still at the center of public debate. Wheatley's very existence as an enslaved Black woman poet at the nation's founding—one who was in literal conversation with the vaunted Founding Fathers, no less—gives the lie to the myth of a white national origin story. Made from within a space of belonging as a moral voice in a religious community, her critique of the new nation's most privileged casting themselves as victims reminds us to assess such claims skeptically and to bring the weight of history to bear on them. Reading Wheatley as a Revolutionary poet, I point out how Wheatley's identification with the Patriots was conditional, predicated on her wariness about white colonists' claims of "slavery" at the hands of the British and her full-throated critique of literal slavery. Drawing from Koritha Mitchell's notion of "homemade citizenship," the article emphasizes Wheatley's literary accomplishments not as efforts to counter racist notions of her intellectual limitations as expressed by Thomas Jefferson—as Henry Louis Gates has argued—but, rather, outlets to pursue her own genius and inventiveness, which she used to imagine an artistic space beyond Black victimhood. Study of Wheatley's oeuvre reveals clearly that critique of the nation has been part of the nation since its founding, and we need not fear it or label it un-American. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By looking at colonization at white responses to Black population increase in the US, this essay argues that exile and other biopolitical mechanisms undo the logic of security by showing how the search for safety itself generates and amplifies insecurity. Framed against contemporary meditations on exile, the essay examines how whites presented the deportation of US Blacks to Liberia as a solution to a national security crisis. In response, Black activists and writers such as James Forten and Russell Parrott demonstrated how white concerns created insecurity among the US Black population. To offset the vulnerability of exile that other colonizationists mandated for Black people, the use of racial arithmetic in Freedom's Journal , the first African American newspaper, and by David Walker shows that security for Blacks can be achieved, at least rhetorically, by mobilizing biopower and exploiting arithmetical ratios of Blacks to whites. In a twist, however, the editor of Freedom's Journal , John Russwurm, emigrated to West Africa to publish the Liberia Herald whose columns reveal how in the exile's safe haven racial differences upheld by the US continued to have meaning. In exile, security and insecurity remained twined about each other in cycles of violence. Extermination is population security at its most absolute.... if the problem of security is the population's ceaseless potential for being born, reproducing, and dying, then, exile and colonization serve as technologies for radically altering the polity in the name of national interest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines efforts by the dispossessed to challenge dispossession without claiming prior possession or demanding renewed possession as a singular remedy. It juxtaposes the author's work as a volunteer advocate for migrants detained in El Paso, Texas, with late seventeenth-century records of the trial of an enslaved Black man named Juan Patricio for assaulting a priest after helping a Maya woman named Fabiana Pech, in Yucatán, Mexico. This juxtaposition reveals a long history of dispossession and Black and Indigenous challenges to it, as well as a method for reading that history by attending to the poiesis of the archive, or the manner in which sources imaginatively remake what we know and how we act in ways that are not dependent upon the willful volition of individual actors. The article proposes a shift away from theories of dispossession that presuppose prior possession and toward a theory of ante-possession: lives lived prior to, in opposition to, or in apposition to possession as such. "We could call these social relations ante-possessive to capture the many ways they thrive before, against, or alongside racial capitalist modes of possession." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the article, the author presents the highlights of the virtual discussion about the state of feminism in the U.S. Topics include the social views about African Americans and transgender people, the white supremacist rhetoric of replacement theory, and the proposed "Women's Bill of Rights" bill introduced by the Republican Party.

The article features Mississippi lawyer Cornelius J. Jones and describes his efforts to fight for the civil rights of African Americans in the 19th century. Also cited are the 1896 cases Plessy v. Ferguson, Gibson v. Mississippi, and Smith v. Mississippi about the civil rights removal statute in the state, Jones' fellow attorney Emanuel M. Hewlett, and Jones' growing up years in post-Reconstruction Mississippi.

In the article, the author discusses the traditions of political change in the U.S., particularly political violence and nonviolence. Also cited are how said traditions were both inspired by the Declaration of Independence and natural law, how African Americans used the tradition of non-violence to achieve political change, and the American tradition of violence as tackled by Robert Middlekauff in his book "The Glorious Cause."

In the article, the author discusses the income tax benefits on homeownership in the U.S. and how they are worsening the African American/white racial wealth gap in the country. Other topics include the civil rights laws that were enacted to equalize access to housing, education and employment in the country, and the barriers to African American homeownership in the country.

The article examines the transcultural counterwitness and the role of poetry counterpublic as an alternative source of knowledge for citizens following a public crisis. Topics discussed include the video poems "Situation 3: August 29, 2005/Hurricane Katrina," by Claudia Rankine and John Lucas and "Wade in the Water," by Walidah Imarisha, and how they counterwitness the widespread stereotypes of African American people in mainstream journalism.

The article discusses the alleged discrimination of African Americans in the provision of health services by examining their plights in prisons and during the coronavirus pandemic. Also cited are a brief history of mass incarceration and systemic racism in the U.S., and the provisions of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, particularly on the right to health.

While prevailing scholarship on utopian fiction, attendant disproportionately to white authors, defines the utopia by way of its temporal or geographical separation from society, I argue that the under-theorized Black utopia is defined by the element of the secret society. The project taken up by Black utopian societies, such as the overlooked "secret societies" of W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and the eponymous shadow government of Sutton E. Griggs's Imperium in Imperio (1899), are articulated but not represented by their respective texts, framed in retrospect and within their own foreclosure. Du Bois and Griggs participate, too, in the intellectual return of much Black writing from the dawn of the Jim Crow Era to the early years of Reconstruction, offering alternative histories that locate utopian potentiality in the project of Reconstruction while identifying the project's failures. Ultimately, the foreclosure of utopian anti-racist potentiality is attributed by these texts to the incompatibility of Black solidarity with interpellation into (white) national subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Fair Housing Act of 1968 includes a provision that requires that the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) administer the policies within the Act to "affirmatively further" fair housing. Scholars have largely derived their analysis from studying large urban areas and struggles to integrate the suburbs. The literature, however, has not focused on the impact of zoning and discriminatory land use policies within and around low-income rural and small communities or specifically in the southeastern United States. Scholars have also insufficiently considered the implications of these policies on the duty to "affirmatively further" fair housing. Racial zoning was the preferred method of establishing residential segregation in the South in the early 20th century until the U.S. Supreme Court formally struck it down in 1917. This Article argues that racial zoning should be considered a logic and a metaphor rather than simply a historical moment in land use policy that has passed. The logic of racial zoning typifies anti-black land use policies that confine African Americans to particular areas, and this confinement facilitates the degradation of these areas. This Article contends that the logic of racial zoning creates black residential spaces and inscribes them with features that seek to render them undesirable. This process entrenches residential segregation by driving non-black residents away, just as rendering white space as desirable and exclusive protects housing inequity. The Article explicates the history of the racial zoning movement and the court cases that led to its demise. These cases, however, left the logic of racial zoning largely untouched. It then examines the legacy of racial zoning through three phenomena: (1) the designating of locations for black communities; (2) the lack of protective zoning given to black residential areas; and (3) the disproportionate siting of LULUs in these areas. Finally, it asks whether the federal Fair Housing Act can remediate this legacy through policy or litigation. The Article argues that fair housing litigation has had limited success in undoing discrimination in land use protections that characterize the legacy of racial zoning. Instead, HUD's AFFH Rule may have a great impact in challenging jurisdictions to tackle community development issues in the context of fair housing. Its success in the South, however, is limited because its oversight mechanisms often overlook smaller, rural communities where anti-black land use policies and segregation patterns remain in place. Ultimately, fair housing in the South is not just about access to housing itself, but also about changing the context around it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Majority-Black cities in North America are not often described in the academic literature as such. Racial capitalism is a restorative approach that puts majority-Black cities in the Global North into analytical relation with other cities in the global urban landscape. This is an important step to take for many reasons, including rising interest in conversations about the financial production of urban natures in the context of climate change. Moreover, there is a dearth of mixed method empirics documenting the role of racial capitalism in the production of urban space and urban natures. To address this gap, I pair a case study of Jackson, Mississippi's, struggle to fund mandated upgrades to its water system with analysis of a data set containing interest rates of approximately 5 million municipal bonds issued between 1970 and 2014. I find that since financial deregulation in 1999 and 2000, majority-Black cities have been charged more than their white counterparts to produce their built environments. These findings reveal a conflation between territorialized Blackness and financial risk. Thus exposed, I argue that the racialization of urban finance has previously unexamined implications for the production of urban natures and the establishment of just transitions and socioecological futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses race relations issues in the U.S., particularly the factors that stratify and divide American society. Also cited are how the COVID-19 pandemic showed the preexisting institutional and infrastructural vulnerabilities and inequalities in the U.S. and how systemic racism, white supremacy, and anti-African American sentiments were reflected in the killing of African Americans like Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Travis McMichael.

Black American households are up to six times less likely to own a car than white families and are four times more likely to rely on public transportation to meet their daily needs. Despite this, communities of color have seen consistent disinvestment in their transit infrastructure. Four hundred years of continued housing segregation combined with post-recession austerity policies and ongoing pro-automobile bias has exacerbated this disparity. This Note proposes a straightforward legislative tool to begin to combat this inequity. The proposed legislation would require that urbanized areas spend their public transit dollars according to the population density of the communities a given project would serve, create reporting requirements related to the racial and economic impact of transit projects, and establish a private right of action. In proposing this legislation, this Note evaluates the state of civil rights litigation as it pertains to transportation racism and draws lessons from other areas such as environmental law in order to put forth a simple solution that would have tangible effects across the country in both the short and long term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores police power and the environmental aspects of social insecurity of African Americans. The author reflects on the emergence of the Black Lives Matter in response to police violence. Emphasis is given to topics such as racism as an embodied experience, asthma rates among African Americans, and the killings of African Americans Mario Woods and Eric Garner by police.

The article explores Pauline Hopkins' literary exodus in the drama "Peculiar Sam, or The Underground Railroad" that subsequently emerged in her later fictions of race. Topics discussed are representations of African American history and contemporary life in the late 19th-century in the drama, Hopkins' use of the minstrel model, depiction of African American family within slavery and escape from oppression, and representation of the rustic and folk aspects of African American culture.

This essay contributes to recent scholarly work on the afterlives of British poetry around the Anglophone world by focusing on how ordinary and anonymous writers in the United States reused the poetry of Lord Byron. It contends that imitations and parodies of Byron that proliferated in newspapers show his poetry to have been malleable, as useful to abolitionists as it was to defenders of white supremacy. Drawing on the methods of historical poetics, the essay examines parodies in the context of their social lives, investigating how people read, understood, and used widely circulating poetry. With this evidence, it contends that many writers used popular poems as metrical templates for their own thoughts and arguments, and uses this insight to analyze parodies of Byron's The Bride of Abydos (1813) that took radically different stances toward the enfranchisement of Black Americans. It concludes that the original poem's formal features—its meter, its rhyme, and especially its rhetorical structure—made it useful to writers who wanted to question the unity of the nation before and after the Civil War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The "Blues Narrative: Blues People, COVID-19, and Civil Unrest" focuses on African Americans born between 1945 and 2004. The article delves into the establishment of homes, lifestyles, and traditions on a concrete terrain with Southern and country values, and shares how those values not only weathered the storm of many generations but how they armed interviewees to defend what some call an all-out attack on the Blues People in the present day. This is an ongoing project conducted from the perspective of a folklorist and ethnographer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political scientists regularly measure anti-Black prejudice in the survey context using racial resentment, an indirect measure that blends racial animus with traditional moral values. Explicit prejudice, a direct measure based in beliefs about the group-level inferiority of Blacks, is used less frequently. We investigate whether these attitudes predict anti-Black discrimination and evaluations of the fairness of intergroup inequality. Study 1 used the Ultimatum Game to obtain a behavioral measure of racial discrimination and found whites engaged in anti-Black discrimination. Explicit prejudice explained which whites discriminated, whereas resentment did not. In study 2, white third-party observers evaluated intergroup interactions in the Ultimatum Game, and explicit prejudice explained racially biased fairness evaluations, but resentment did not. This demonstrates that resentment and prejudice are distinct constructs and that explicit prejudice has clear behavioral implications. We also find that explicit prejudice is widespread among white Americans and significantly less partisan than resentment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discuses the importance of history and collective memory in the quest of identity in the literary work "The Piano Lesson" by August Wilson. Other topics include the memory of slavery, the experiences and challenges faced by African American families during and after slavery, and the African American identity in the U.S.

An interview with "Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril Among the Black Middle Class" author Doctor Mary Pattillo is presented. He reminisces on his growing up years in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He discusses his experiences of inequality as part of the busing experiment. He talks about his studies at Columbia University taking up urban studies as major course and sociology as minor course.

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