HIS 351/AAS 400 - Black Environmental Freedom Struggles in U.S. History: Movement and Migration

This is a collection of interviews with descendants of Kentucky African and Americans who were instrumental in the settlement of Nicodemus, Kansas, the only remaining African American western town established after the American Civil War. The collection also includes an Indigenous American migration story. These oral histories also explore feminist histories and more specifically migration histories and connections between Kentucky and Kansas communities. The oral histories illustrate the complexity of intersectional identity in the Heartland communities.

The African American Experience In Southeastern Kentucky Oral History Project explores, documents, and shares African American experiences from southeastern Kentucky African American residents, especially those from Knox, Laurel, Whitley, and Clay Counties. The interviews give insight into the lives and contributions of African Americans in the Quad-County area and beyond. A research team of the project co-directors, community researchers, and project consultants worked together through the Laurel County African American Heritage Center to highlight diverse voices in the community and broaden the narrative about the history of the area.

Project Summary
Goin' North documents the First Great Migration of southern Blacks to northern cities unleashed by the First World War, including their lives in the South and reasons for moving north, rumors and expectations about life in the North, first impressions of the city, employment experiences in industrial occupations and service work, housing and homeownership, inter- and intra-race relations, political exclusion and then empowerment as part of Democratic coalition of the 1930s, Black nightlife and the city's commercial vice economy between the 1910s and 1930s, and personal life reflections on the move north and its impact in their lives.

An online exhibit based on the Goin' North Oral History Project.

Backwater Blues analyzes the Mississippi River flood of 1927 through the lenses of race and charity, blues music, and mobility and labor. Challenging long-standing ideas of African American environmental complacency, it offers insights into the broader dynamics of human interactions with nature as well as ways in which nature is mediated through the social and political dynamics of race.

In the first interdisciplinary history to frame the African American Great Migration as an environmental experience, Landscapes of Hope travels to Chicago’s parks and beaches as well as youth camps, vacation resorts, and the farms and forests of the rural Midwest. Despite persistent racial discrimination and violence in many of these places, African Americans retreated there to relax and sometimes work, reconnecting with southern identities and lifestyles they had left behind.

Since the 2016 presidential election, Americans have witnessed countless stories about Appalachia: its changing political leanings, its opioid crisis, its increasing joblessness, and its declining population. These stories, however, largely ignore black Appalachian lives. Karida L. Brown’s Gone Home offers a much-needed corrective to the current whitewashing of Appalachia. In telling the stories of African Americans living and working in Appalachian coal towns, Brown offers a sweeping look at race, identity, changes in politics and policy, and black migration in the region and beyond.]

The lumber industry employed more African American men than any southern economic sector outside agriculture, yet those workers have been almost completely ignored by scholars. Drawing on a substantial number of oral history interviews as well as on manuscript sources, local newspapers, and government documents, The Tribe of Black Ulysses explores black men and women's changing relationship to industrial work in three sawmill communities.