79-158 Beyond Integration: African American Community Building, Reconstruction to 1960s
9 units, Carnegie Mellon University
This course thinks about African American community building as a compliment and alternative to integration, assimilation, and appeasement. While so much scholarship focuses on resistance, efforts to integrate and to ensure equal access, understanding how African American communities flourished or were sustained during these periods is often limited to conversations surrounding Black Wall Streets, and highachieving African Americans as a goal or outcome of hard work toward assimilation. Conversely, scholarship also focuses on history from below by examining the trials, tribulations, and underbellies of Black communities as monoliths that define the entirety of the African American experience and are in need of escape. Beyond Integration asks what was daily life in Black communities like through case studies that examine education, home life, business ventures, healthcare, clubs, food, farming, philanthropy, professionalization and more. This course also thinks about Black communities as thriving centers of life outside of, sometimes adjacent to, and in spite of white or mainstream society. It thinks about the development of selfidentities through art and culture and through the acknowledgement of the humanity of the race. Students will discuss among other topics the evolution of Black normal schools into the HBCUs of today, as well as overall education in African American communities, migration vs. cast[ing down your buckets where you are, African American clubs and Black club women, class in African American communities, religion Christianity and beyond, and African American coops and grocery stores. This course is designed to think about African American communities and lives beyond what is seen or read in mass media, and address the perceptions and preconceived notions of the race that limit African Americans to one version of being in the United States.
Prerequisites: none listed
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