Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper examines the wide assortment of invidious state legislation and discriminatory governmental circulars promoted by leaders of the Mexican anti-Chinese movement between the years of 1916-1935. Unbeknownst to most, during the early twentieth century, Chinese immigrants were the second largest immigrant community in all of Mexico. During these years, Chinese immigrants scattered themselves throughout Mexico and, most significantly, developed a monopoly over small-scale trade in northern Mexico. Their economic success prompted the development of an organized anti-Chinese movement by disgruntled lower-middle class Mexican merchants who could not compete with their Chinese immigrant counterparts. As one important means of advancing their stated goal of bringing about the extinction of the Asian merchant class, leaders of the anti-Chinese movement promulgated a wide array of invidious legislation, including discriminatory labor laws and public health circulars, anti-miscegenation laws, and residential segregation laws. In addition to examining these discriminatory laws, this paper shall also highlight some of the legal and extralegal strategies utilized by the Chinese immigrant community to combat such racist legislation. In response to the legal assault waged against them by the leaders of the anti-Chinese movement, Chinese immigrants hired top-flight Mexican attorneys to challenge the constitutionality and application of such invidious legislation, sometimes even taking their cases all the way to the Mexican federal Supreme Court. Where such legal remedies failed, Chinese immigrant merchants sought to defend their legal rights through diplomatic intervention, the voluntary closure of shops, bribery of governmental officials, and blackmail involving the hoarding of foodstuffs and basic commodities.

Publication Type: Invited Paper
Abstract: This paper interrogates the ways in which black dockworkers utilized their monopoly of segmented labor markets during the WWI era to challenge racial exclusion and dual wage scales in the longshore industry. This analysis incorporates transnational approaches migrant labor protest and examines the role of the state in sustaining racial hierarchy in the industry.

Publication Type: Individual Paper
Abstract: Between 1916 and 1929, African Americans who migrated to or otherwise lived in Detroit endured race-based residential discrimination, inadequate housing options, and governmental neglect of the housing situation. Arising in response to the beginnings of the Great Migration of 1915-1919, the Detroit Urban League attempted to locate decent housing for African Americans as part of a larger mission of assimilating newcomers to Detroit.

During the first two decades of its existence, the Detroit Urban League helped migrant black workers and families secure jobs and decent housing, but soon after the Great Migration period, it shifted its attention to away from housing issues. From 1916-1920, the League split its efforts between housing problems and employment issues within the African American community. From 1921-1925, the League retreated from its grassroots work and instead focused on statistical research on Detroit’s racialized housing blight and, with the exception of the Ossian Sweet incident of 1925-1926, the League in the period from 1926-1929 did little more than sponsor neighborhood beautification projects. My paper argues that the housing issues of Detroit during the 1916 to 1929 period created a rift between the Urban League’s application of its middle class values of respectability and the needs of working class African Americans, for whom housing represented a preeminent concern. I conclude that while the League’s investigative work and case-by-case approach did not produce substantial changes in Detroit’s housing situation, its work, particularly from 1917-1920, provided needed aid during a time when government at all levels failed to listen.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper examiens the labor conflict known as the Everett Massacre, which occurred in Everett, Washington, on November 5, 1916. The much-celebrated confrontation between members of the Industrial Workers of the World and local law officials and citizen groups came to symbolize the sharp class divisions that shaped the lumber industry in the latter years of the 19th century in the Northwest. The paper utilizes event structure analysis as a means to identify the causal structure of this conflict, interpreting this structure in the context of broader national changes in both the consolidation of capital and the organization of labor.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: An East Texas native and black feminist intellectual, Lillian B. Jones wore many professional hats over her lifetime, one that spanned from 1886-1965. She was a teacher, pioneering librarian, clubwoman, and Baptist churchwoman. Notwithstanding her many involvements, Jones' greatest aspiration was to write a book worth reading by an intelligent person, "not necessarily [her] friend." She realized her dream in __Five Generations Hence__, a 165-page novel written as Jones taught in rural Texas schools and subsidized with her secondary teacher's pay. Similar to the once unknown writings of Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), Jones' novel has been buried in obscurity for 84 years. Given its publication date, 1916, history now honors it as the earliest novel on record by a black woman from Texas. This is a significant find particularly for black women's history of the southwest, where Jim Crow educational and social systems aimed to underdevelop black minds and discredit black women. Like many African American writers of the Post-Reconstuction era, Jones used her novel for a sociopolitical purpose. She and her contemporaries critiqued the exclusion of blacks from American life and argued for their inclusion by creating characters that displayed middle class values, piety, and production. Her novel is nonetheless unique in its call for a transcontinental dialogue between Africa and America, one that hinged on economic self-sufficiency and most particularly on the noble ideas and deeds of intelligent black women. In this essay, I hope to place Jones and her work within the context of black women's intellectual history by examining her intellectual life, her creative work, and its prophetic attention to Africa.