Race has always been a central issue in discussions of jazz. A history of the representation of jazz in the American cinema is, in many ways, a history of the representation of African Americans, including their struggle to overcome oppression from whites. But as the title of this paper suggests, jazz is one of several aspects of American culture which has delighted white people and inspired them to appropriate– or to steal– the music of Black people. Many of the early jazz films were built around the white swing orchestras and their followers. In the 1940s and 1950s, biopics told the stories of white jazz artists. Biopics of black artists appeared in the 1960s and later. More recently, jazz has been celebrated as an art that allows musicians and audiences to ascend to a higher plane.

Rhetoric is of paramount importance when facing an issue that requires a reformation of public sentiment. Such an issue is the struggle for the protection of the civil rights of black Americans. This section consists of six speeches that address this issue. The speakers include Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, and Malcom X.

John Rawls has been sharply criticized, most notably by Charles Mills, for not sufficiently addressing questions of racial justice. Specifically, Mills has argued that it is a deep flaw in Rawls’s framework (and in much liberal theory that has followed Rawls’s example) that it cannot account for the legitimacy of reparations claims for past racial injustices. In response to this influential charge, the present chapter argues that reparations for racial injustice can be understood and defended within the framework of justice as fairness. It discusses the political morality of reparations and its relation to racial justice. It also explores the often-misunderstood relationship between reparative justice and distributive justice.

This chapter provides an understanding of how an Anglo-Atlantic antislavery movement and the prospect of emancipation in the British West Indies unleashed a growing debate on its impact on the United States. This followed from a history of fears of foreign “moral contagion” on the issue of slavery, and similar domestic anxieties — including slave rebellion in Virginia and an emergent abolitionist movement. Highlighting anti-abolitionist riots in New York in 1833 and 1834, it situates these events within trepidations of national and racial boundary crossings that grew out of anxieties over British Emancipation in its Caribbean colonies and its influence on America.

This chapter provides a study of commemorations of British Emancipation in the Atlantic world and their political meanings, exploring their transnational divergences and intersections in the cultural production of freedom. Starting with the Caribbean, it examines freedpeople’s celebrations of emancipation and how this at times conflicted with missionary and colonial elites’ directives on how freedom and slavery should be remembered and memorialized. In the United States, it traces the development of celebrations of August 1 and argues that these events arose out of attempts to shape public perceptions on the success of the experiment. August 1 enabled abolitionists and African Americans to publicly merge political and intellectual thoughts with the transnational triumph of British Emancipation toward an antislavery strategy at home.

This chapter examines free African Americans’ perceptions of the emancipated British West Indies. As I argue, beyond many of the concerns of their white abolitionist allies, free African Americans considered the experiment’s implications for their own future prospects of liberty, racial equality, and citizenship rights in the United States. In their autonomous newspapers, speeches, and print publications, they touted the success of the emancipated British West Indies as evidence against notions of black inferiority and as a model for participatory citizenship. But this narrative was complicated by a short-lived but provocative West Indian Emigration Scheme of the late 1830s, stimulating heated debates in the black press that reveal the limits of transnational identity.

During winter and spring of 1865, Tennessee amendments gain voter approval, abolishing slavery in the state, and loyalist government elected and inaugurated. Legislatures of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee approve Thirteenth Amendment. Lincoln and congressional Republicans fail to reach accord on Reconstruction legislation before Congress adjourns in early March, and Congress refuses to seat Louisiana and Arkansas claimants but creates Freedmen’s Bureau. Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address promises reconciliation for former Confederates and justice for freedpeople. Following Lee’s surrender, Lincoln’s “last” address defends his Reconstruction policy and the Louisiana government, although Lincoln also for the first time publicly endorses black suffrage and acknowledges black role in Reconstruction. Confederate surrender in western theater takes several more weeks. Andrew Johnson announces Reconstruction policy in late May 1865, recognizing governments of Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana but rejecting calls for black role in Reconstruction.

With reelection secure, Lincoln calls for US House approval of Thirteenth Amendment, and campaign launched in early 1865 to win passage. Lincoln also suggests Reconstruction policy may change when war is over, and efforts to enact Reconstruction legislation is revived. Black political convention in New Orleans in January 1865 calls for political and legal equality, but also reveals tensions within free black community. Tennessee convention, although contentious, drafts amendments to state constitution abolishing slavery and creating loyalist government, but refuses to implement racial equality, despite petition from black Tennesseans. US House passes Thirteenth Amendment in late January.

This chapter traces the history of the limited but nonetheless significant transnational contact between Americans and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) before 1969. The chapter posits that these earlier interactions acted as a precursor to the far more numerous and frequent – but in other ways not wholly dissimilar – exchange visits of the 1970s. The chapter also places these earlier Sino-American contacts in two broader contexts: the PRC’s overall people-to-people and exchange diplomacy before 1971, and the role of cultural exchanges in the Cold War era foreign relations of the United States. The chapter reviews a substantial historiography that demonstrates that the governments of both the PRC and the United States saw exchanges as a critical part of their country’s relations with the outside world before 1971. The chapter concludes with a section detailing the context in which, in the mid-1960s, the National Committee on US-China Relations and the Committee on Scholarly Communication with Mainland China (later the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People’s Republic of China) were founded.

This 1936 essay laments the lack of knowledge that African Americans and Indians have of one another, attributing the situation to poor journalistic standards and propaganda, which encourage false, frivolous, and sensationalist stories and suppress news of freedom struggles on both sides. Religious differences also hinder understanding. It calls for Indians and African Americans to understand their respective anti-imperialist and anti-racist struggles as facets of the same “world-wide clash of colour,” to stand together against exploitation by white races, and to commit to new and emancipatory forms of economic activity so that exploitation by whites is not replaced by that “of coloured races by coloured men.”

This draft of a letter to President Woodrow Wilson was written around November 1918 as Wilson was preparing to sail to Europe for the Paris Peace Conference and Du Bois was likewise about to sail to Paris, to convene the 1919 Pan-African Congress. Du Bois argues that the oppression of African Americans is a matter of international concern comparable to questions due to be taken up at the Paris conference such as the fate of the Polish and Yugoslav peoples. He calls attention to the inconsistency of the United States’ pretense to world leadership in defense of peoples’ right to representative government alongside its denial of civil and political rights to African Americans. He notes African Americans’ numbers, equivalent to those of a number of sovereign countries, and their significant contributions to the country’s history, economy, and military defense. He concludes that “America owes to the world the solution of her race problem.”

Afro-Latin American newspapers included extensive coverage of Black populations in other countries. Articles on Black populations and race relations in Latin America, the United States, and Europe and Africa are examples of “practices of diaspora,” international communication and engagement among Black peoples that grew out of, and helped to forge, feelings of connectedness and racial solidarity. The Black press also reported on, or offered commentary on, more formal political movements promoting Black internationalism, such as Garveyism. Black papers in Argentina and Uruguay reported regularly on their northern neighbor, Brazil. Cuban papers included Puerto Rican and Dominican writers and discussions of Haiti. Throughout Latin America, writers and intellectuals of all races watched with mixed horror and fascination the workings of racial segregation and anti-Blackness in the United States. Diasporic ties were further thickened by travel, migration, and personal connections and friendships among African American and Afro-Latin American writers and intellectuals.

In this essay, I chart a new origin story to counter popular understandings of the triumphalist, celebratory, northern- and abolitionist-centered origins of American animal welfare by providing underexplored historical context for the proslavery as well as antislavery origins of humane sentiment. I argue that humane carceral logics, or the rationale that surveillance, prosecution, and incarceration to protect animals through the legal system justified as well as pacified the means, ultimately produced coercive and discriminatory tools that naturalized white reformers’ heightened scrutiny of communities of color. I explore how white supremacy contributed to the formation of humane carceral logics by providing a historical study of carceral trends and the ways in which humane sentiment produced racial knowledge.