Using Archaeology to Understand Strategies of Racial Uplift, Past, Present, and Future: A Case Study from Annapolis, Maryland

Summary

Following the end of Reconstruction, the leaders of the African American community strove to combat negative stereotypes presented by the White majority using various strategies of racial uplift designed to develop a positive Black identity. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, these strategies could be classified as strategies of inclusion, advocated by scholars such as Booker T. Washington and Nannie Helen Burroughs, and strategies of autonomy, described by W.E.B. Du Bois and Anna Julia Cooper. In the 21st century, these same strategies are called "the politics of respectability" and "the Black Lives Matter movement". Using archaeological examples from Annapolis, Maryland, this paper explores how these strategies were incorporated into the behaviors of individuals in the past, especially African American women who had to negotiate multiple levels of domination in order to achieve racial uplift, in order to better understand the manifestations of the same strategies in the present.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Intersectionality as Emancipatory Archaeology   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2017

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 369