History

"The Early Black Press in Canada" in Media Across the African Diaspora: Contents, Audiences and Influence

This volume gathers scholarship from varying disciplinary perspectives to explore media owned or created by members of the African diaspora, examine its relationship with diasporic audiences, and consider its impact on mainstream culture in general. Contributors highlight creations and contributions of people of the African diaspora, the interconnections of Black American and African-centered media, and […]

North of the Color Line: Migration and Black Resistance in Canada, 1870-1955

North of the Color Line examines life in Canada for the estimated 5,000 blacks, both African Americans and West Indians, who immigrated to Canada after the end of Reconstruction in the United States. Through the experiences of black railway workers and their union, the Order of Sleeping Car Porters, Sarah-Jane Mathieu connects social, political, labor, immigration, […]

"The Great Migration Reconsidered" in Magazine of History, 23 (4)

"The Black Experience in Canada Revisited" in Migrants and Migration in Modern North America: Cross-Border Life Courses, Labor Markets, and Politics in Canada, the Caribbean, Mexico, and the United States, 399-421

Presenting an unprecedented, integrated view of migration in North America, this interdisciplinary collection of essays illuminates the movements of people within and between Canada, the Caribbean, Mexico, and the United States over the past two centuries. Several essays discuss recent migrations from Central America as well.

"North of the Color Line: Sleeping Car Porters and the Battle Against Jim Crow on Canadian Rails, 1880-1920" in Labour/Le Travail 47, 9-42

This paper analyses the evolution of Jim Crow employment patterns in the Canadian railway industry from the 1880s to World War I. It presents race as a central organizing principle in employers' decision to hire black railwaymen for their sleeping and dining car departments. Canadian railway managers actively sought out African American, West Indian, and […]

"L'Union Fait La Force: Black Soldiers in the Great War" in First World War Studies, 9 (2)

Though the Great War is imagined and discussed as a European conflagration, an epic showdown between white Europeans, the simple fact remains that from the first, European battlefields mirrored the multiracial makeup of the empires doing battle. The Allies depended most heavily on their black soldiers, both as combatants and as labourers, even if it […]

"Great Expectations: African Americans and the Great War" in American Quarterly, 63 (2)

Forging a Laboring Race: The African Worker in the Progressive Imagination

Forging a Laboring Race charts the history of an idea—race management—building on recent work in African American, labor, and disability history to analyze how ideas of race, work, and the “fit” or “unfit” body informed the political economy of early twentieth-century industrial America.

"The Tragic Action and Revolutionary Intent of Black Lives: Historical Genealogies of Cornel West's Prophetic Pragmatism in Post-Racial America" in Truth in the Public Sphere, 63-77

"Race, Work and Disability in Progressive Era America" in The Oxford Handbook of Disability History, 350-371

Throughout U.S. history, the production of difference, whether along racial or disability lines, has been inextricably tied to the imperatives of labor economy. From the plantations of the antebellum era through the assembly lines and trenches of early-twentieth-century America, ideologies of race and disability have delineated which peoples could do which kinds of work. The […]