The Africana Studies Institute hosted their final book talk of the semester with professors Jeffrey Ogbar and Dexter Gabriel. Ogbar is a professor of history at the University of Connecticut and the founding director of the Center for the Study of Popular Music. Gabriel is also a professor of history and earned his doctorate from Stony Brook University.
The first presentation, given by Ogbar, was titled “America’s Black Capital: How African Americans Remade Atlanta in the Shadow of the Confederacy.” He described how his project “initially looked at the last 50 years of Atlanta” to examine how it became known as the “Black Mecca” of the South. Although known for its large Black population and for being a place of success for Black people, Ogbar discovered that Atlanta once was one of the most racially hostile cities.
From his research, Ogbar argues that “you couldn’t find a city that was more explicitly hostile towards Black people than Atlanta.” Currently, Atlanta is a spearhead of Black culture in America; yet it was also the “heart of the Confederacy” during the Civil War and home to the headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan during the 1920s.
Ogbar posits that it was Atlanta’s legacy as a home of white nationalism that ironically led to its foundation as a home for Black leadership and success. For much of its history, Atlanta’s government was dominated by white people, especially those who openly opposed the Civil Rights Movement. “You didn’t see photos and documentation of the Civil Rights Movement in Atlanta like you’d see in Memphis or Jackson,” Ogbar said.
A reason for this was because of how restrictive Atlanta laws were compared to the rest of the United States. Situations like the Little Rock Nine were avoided because there was no Black public education available past eighth, or sometimes even seventh, grade. Yet, Black private schools and colleges stepped up to fulfill the role of general education. Ogbar believes that this rise in educated Black people would lead to the creation of more Black businesses and a larger middle class.
You didn’t see photos and documentation of the Civil Rights Movement in Atlanta like you’d see in Memphis or Jackson.
Jeffrey Ogbar, Professor of History at the University of Connecticut and the founding director of the Center for the Study of Popular Music
The second presentation, “Jubilee’s Experiment: The British West Indies and American Abolitionism,” provided a brief snippet of Gabriel’s new book. He stated that the work started as his dissertation, and he later turned it into a manuscript. In the book, Gabriel analyzes the public discourse in the United States between abolitionists and anti-abolitionists in the memory of the emancipation of the British West Indies.
During the 1830s, the British government passed the Slavery Abolition Act and implemented a system of apprenticeship. Basically, this system maintained the current labor force and had shifted it to wage labor, with varying accounts of success. Gabriel came across this because he was interested in why the West Indian Emancipation Day was a holiday in the U.S.
He found that the entire world watched the “experiment” that was emancipation to see if it would succeed. Despite abolitionists and anti-abolitionists watching the same event, both sides used it to argue for their stances. Abolitionists initially praised emancipation but would later acknowledge the failure of the apprenticeship. Anti-abolitionists pointed out the turmoil and strife that occurred but ignored that it was caused by apprenticeship being just another form of slavery.
Gabriel showed various cartoons and depictions of life during this time. For those in America, the cartoons either portrayed apprenticeship as a new hope for slaves or as the end of the white population. Yet it couldn’t be denied that apprenticeship failed; Gabriel argued that it was because it upheld the slave-slaver dynamic by compensating slavers for the loss of their labor by keeping them on their plantations.
This was upheld through the laws and punishments in place that prevented former slaves from either leaving the plantations or punishing them for their behavior. Gabriel described how corporal punishment — like whipping or flogging — was still prevalent, along with the presence of police to ensure that enslaved people could not leave or be out past curfew. This experiment and its complications had great meaning all around the world. Gabriel emphasized the impact it had on the struggle against slavery in the antebellum South.
The presentations made by each speaker evoked both interesting questions and chuckles from the audience. Their research displayed a significant level of care and desire to know more about the history of the U.S. in relation to race and slavery. The event ended on the note that graduate students should take advantage of opportunities to present their ongoing research to gain feedback from audiences.