Publication Type: Individual Paper
Abstract: On June 22, 2005, the Philadelphia School District voted unanimously to make a course in African American history mandatory for all of its 53 high schools. The School Reform Commission, the panel that establishes policy consisting of three white and two black members, voted 5 to 0 in favor of the measure. In a school district that consists of 185,000 students and is two-thirds black, making black history compulsory was to admit its importance, not because African Americans dominated the schools numerically, but because of what Carter G. Woodson argued over 80 years ago about the importance of �Negro� history. Unfortunately for millions of students in the twentieth century, the Philadelphia case represented a policy anomaly. School districts across the United States legally deprived majority students and students of color the opportunity to become more knowledgeable about the American past. What has instead filled the void for teaching blacks and whites about African American history has been a grassroots insurgency beginning in 1926 that has evolved into unofficial education policy: Negro History Week. This paper will argue that Woodson�s objective in 1926 and beyond was to immediately change education policy in regards to K-12 history in public schools. Realizing that changing the way districts taught history would be an uphill struggle, Woodson perennialized black history�taking a vital part of the black freedom struggle to the American calendar, and encouraging teachers to promote black history at the grassroots level. I will argue that the success of Negro History Week, serving as a proxy for educational policy, has retarded the process toward official policy by allowing white school administrators off the hook in creating meaningful curriculum reform.

Publication Type: Individual Paper
Abstract: The National Negro Business League in Early Twentieth Century America

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: South Carolina, facing slave insurrections from within and national interference with slavery from without, passed in 1822 a police law �for the better regulation of Free Negroes and persons of color� that targeted those engaged in the seafaring trade. Its sweeping racial dimensions, expanded in 1835 and 1844, subjected all free black mariners arriving into South Carolina ports to immediate imprisonment under penalty of enslavement if their confinement fees went unpaid. Southern lawmakers argued for public safety and the �law of self-preservation� against �foreign negroes� seeking �to disturb the peace and tranquility of the state.� They saw in the early internationalism of Black Atlantic seafaring life a menace to slaveholding localisms, and used this racial threat to further expand state power vis-�-vis the federal government.

British and American sailors instigated a number of legal actions from Elkison v. Deliesseline (1823) to Roberts v. Yates (1853) to test the law�s constitutionality and secure its repeal, but South Carolina successfully blocked them all from going before the federal Supreme Court. Denied the courtroom, an uneasy and shifting transatlantic alliance of black and white antislavery activists, seamen and ship owners in the 1850s appealed to the �public mind� to do the work that legislators and jurists refused. It sought less to address the abstract points of law than to guide public sympathy towards the harrowing plight of free black mariners through the publication and dissemination of memorials, lectures, fiction and pamphlets.

Francis Colburn Adams based his popular novel Manuel Pereira upon the unsuccessful legal struggles of one such black Portuguese sailor seized from a British vessel. Pereira sailed as a free subject under the protection of Great Britain, but South Carolina remade him into a �nigger� to be beaten, imprisoned and starved once he touched its shores. Legislative documents offer little insight into the subjective experiences of those the law afflicted, and Adams used the novel to give dramatic voice to the countless numbers of free black seamen who suffered silently under South Carolina�s abusive regulation. Manuel Pereira prompted an indignant public to demand stronger diplomatic efforts to secure the law�s repeal, and its cautionary tale of post-emancipation freedom placed uncomfortable pressure upon notions of liberty that had become foundational to the construction of British national character. The stories of �free-born British subjects� shorn of their freedom through the inexorable workings of South Carolina�s �most barbarous and oppressive law� forced Britain to make sense of its Atlantic empire as its wrestled with its governmental responsibilities to those living in its far-flung territories.

Free black mariners like Pereira, regardless of their national allegiances, could not possess absolute freedom without the transhemispheric abolition of African slavery, and their stories were particularly effective at rousing British national sentiment against slavery in the Americas. Black American abolitionists like Samuel Ringgold Ward sought to convey the Atlantic contours of the antislavery campaign that necessarily transcended both national identifications and geopolitical boundaries. The problem of American slavery, they insisted, was too the problem of British freedom.

Publication Type: Abstract
Abstract: On Negros Island and elsewhere in the Philippines, where over 90% of its original forest has been removed and implementation of existing wildlife laws remain weak, populations of many wildlife species including birds, are rapidly declining and may eventually become extinct. Among these birds is the Critically Endangered Negros Bleeding-heart Pigeon Gallicolumba keayi. Field surveys revealed for the first time the current distribution and population of the species on the Island. The species distribution showed it to be very restricted on lowland areas with forests. It is also shown to survive in areas with agricultural development. Breeding and feeding areas and food plants were documented in Calinawan, Mantikil, Twin Lakes and Mt. Talinis areas. The initiative of the Province in coming up with a province-wide environmental public awareness campaign on the protection of this and other wildlife species has given way to a sustainable conservation program of the species all throughout the Island of Negros. It is hoped that these efforts may lead to activities that could be done to mitigate the threats to the sustainability of its population and the preservation of its habitat.

Publication Type: Individual Paper
Abstract: The paper wants to shed light on the two organizations, The Committee against Jim Crow in Military Service and Training and the The League for Non-Violent Civil Disobedience,
and their activism that have not garnered much attention in historical research.
On July 26, 1948, President Harry S. Truman issued Executive Order 9981 that was intended to establish �equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the Armed Services without regard to race, color, religion, or national origin� and eventually led to the integration of the American armed forces foremost during the Korean War.
The aforementioned organizations played an essential role in achieving the issuing of Truman�s order. In late 1947 and in mid-1948 respectively, A. Philip Randolph, the President of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and Grant Reynolds, an army chaplain during World War II and New York State Commissioner of Correction, founded the two civil rights groups to fight for the integration of the armed services.
Among other questions, it wants to consider ho and why these two organizations fought for their aims, how they overlapped and complemented each other, in what relation they stood e.g. to the NAACP. Whereas Truman�s executive order provoked Randolph�s and Reynolds� abandonment of the League, which was continued by Bayard Rustin under a new name, the two continued their activities within Committee. The paper also wants to look at the impending conflicts and developments between their members following the executive order.