Projects

SERIES A: BLACK LIFE IN RURAL AMERICA

Mardi Gras, New Roads, Louisiana
Photo by Jackson Trey Smith

La Pointe Coupée Noir examines one of the oldest black communities in the Mississippi Valley. Pointe Coupee Parish in Louisiana is home to a unique cultural mélange. From a mixture of African, Indian and European ethnicities, living under many different national flags, emerged vibrant black and Creole communities. During the era of slavery, as plantation society matured, Pointe Coupee became a final destination for a diverse group of black survivors of both the African and American slave trades. In the parish we find, carnival celebrations initiated at the turn of the century, unique foodways, rare North American communities of black French-speakers, black Catholicism and many other traditions that are among the oldest in Louisiana.

Graduation Ceremony, Lincoln University,
Pennsylvania

The African Americans of Historic Chester County, Pennsylvania examines black life in a small farming community that emerged at the intersection of economic and cultural exchange 45 miles south of Philadelphia. Originally a slaveholding area, its impact on black life transformed significantly in the nineteenth-century. First, as part of the Underground Railroad, close proximity to Maryland placed the county at the center of the antislavery movement. As the nation’s earliest center for higher education for blacks, the region boasts a long list of successes. For example from 1854-1954, greater than 20% of the nation’s black doctors and 10% of black lawyers were educated in Chester County. The complex journey of a diverse black community’s transformation from slavery to freedom, and its remarkable impact on black societies worldwide, are the focus of this work.

Longacre, West Virginia

Black Culture in the Coalfields of West Virginia finds that while many African Americans headed for urban areas during the era of the Great Migration, for some, sparsely populated coalmining communities were a “land of opportunity.” This study traces black migration to West Virginia beginning in the early 1900’s. Struggles for miners’ rights, racism and racial segregation, environmental challenges and extreme poverty formed the backdrop of black community-culture transformations in the state’s hollows. This is an intriguing history of a small, yet culturally, socially, economically and politically significant minority in the Appalachian landscape.

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