Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item Faithful Genres: Rhetorics of the Civil Rights Mass Meeting(2016) Miller, Elizabeth Ellis; Enoch, Jessica; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Faithful Genres” examines how African Americans adapted the genres of the black church during the civil rights movement. Civil rights mass meetings, as the movement’s so-called “energy machine” and “heartbeat,” serve as the project’s central site of inquiry for these meetings were themselves adaptations of the genre of the black church service. The mass meetings served as the space to draw people into the movement, encourage people toward further activism, and testify to anyone watching that the African American community was working toward desegregation, voting rights, and racial equality. In Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words, “Through these meetings we were able to generate the power and depth which finally galvanized the entire Negro community.” In these weekly or sometimes even nightly meetings, participants inhabited the familiar genres of the black church, song, prayer, and testimony. As they did, they remade these genres to respond directly to white supremacy and to enact the changes they sought to create. While scholars have studied the speeches men and women such as King, Ralph Abernathy, and Fannie Lou Hamer delivered at meetings (Wilson; Selby; Holmes; Brooks), scholars have yet to examine how civil rights mass meetings functioned through a range of genres and rhetors. My study addresses this absence and invigorates this discussion to demonstrate how the other meeting genres beyond the speech—song, prayer, and testimony—functioned to create energy, sustenance, and motivation for activists. Examining these collectively enacted genres, I show how rhetors adapted song, prayer, and testimony toward strategic interventions. I also examine how activists took these same genres up outside the meetings to circulate them in broader contexts for new audiences. By recovering and defining the mass meeting as a flexible repertoire of genres and then examining the redeployment of meeting genres outside the meeting, “Faithful Genres” contributes to histories of civil rights and African American rhetorics, genre studies, and histories of religious rhetorics.Item "To Strike for Right, To Strike With Might": African Americans and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Baltimore, 1910-1930(2015) Doster, Dennis Anthony; Barkley Brown, Elsa; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“‘To Strike for Right, To Strike With Might’: African Americans and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Baltimore, 1910–1930” examines the nature, character and scope of early civil rights activism among African Americans in Baltimore, Maryland. Utilizing an expansive definition of “civil rights,” it explores not only voting and holding political office, access to public education, and fair housing opportunities; it also considers struggles for access to municipal and social services and struggles related to labor and employment. By placing all of these terrains of struggle under the umbrella of “civil rights,” the dissertation emphasizes the importance of these rights in relation to one another and their importance in the minds and lives of African Americans who struggled for rights in each of these categories as part of a broader struggle for equality. Baltimore has long been recognized for its civil rights activism by scholars who portray the era of the 1930s to 1950s as a kind of “golden age” of civil rights activism in the city, considering such activism to have been dormant prior to that period. The dissertation reveals an active civil rights movement in the city in the decades preceding the 1930s that was led primarily by members of the middle-class but drew widespread support and strength from members of all classes in Baltimore’s African American community. In uncovering the civil rights activism of the period from 1910 to 1930, the dissertation brings to the forefront previously ignored organizations, including the Federation of Parent-Teacher Clubs, the Women’s Cooperative Civic League, the Independent Republican League, and the Baltimore Urban League. It also reveals that the activism of the period from 1910 to 1930 was important in launching major civil rights campaigns of national organizations such as the NAACP, whose residential segregation campaign had roots in the fight in Baltimore. Throughout, the dissertation explores the ways that black Baltimoreans defined priorities and struggled for rights, resulting in a more nuanced understanding of African Americans’ struggles for citizenship and equality at beginning of the twentieth century.Item "The Schools are Killing our Kids!": The African American Fight for Self-Determination in the Boston Public Schools, 1949-1985(2014) Bundy, Lauren Tess; Freund, David M; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines a grassroots movement led by black Bostonians to achieve racial justice, quality education, and community empowerment in the Boston Public Schools during the postwar period. From the late 1940s through the early 1980s black parents, teachers, and students employed a wide-range of strategies in pursuit of these goals including staging school boycotts, creating freedom schools, establishing independent alternative schools, lobbying for legislation, forming parent and youth groups, and organizing hundreds of grassroots organizations. At the heart of this movement was a desire to improve the quality of education afforded to black youth and to expand the power of black Bostonians in educational governance. This dissertation demonstrates that desegregation and community control were not mutually exclusive goals or strategies of black educational activism. I examine the evolution of the goals, ideology, and strategy of this movement over the course of more than three decades in response to shifts in the national and local political climate. This work traces the close ties between this local movement in Boston and broader movements for racial and social justice unfolding across the nation in the 1940s, 50s, 60s, and 70s. Most importantly, my dissertation puts this movement in conversation with a broader national project of various marginalized groups in the postwar period to radically transform the institutions of democracy. This dissertation challenges a well-known narrative of civil rights and school desegregation in Boston in this period. This story of the so-called Boston "busing crisis" focuses on white resistance, a narrow period of time in the mid-1970s, and court-ordered desegregation. In the rare instances in which black Bostonians are included in this narrative it is as victims or apathetic bystanders. The rhetoric of "busing," particularly the framing of opposition to desegregation as "anti-busing," obscured and continues to obscure the more complex racial politics driving the opposition to the integration of the Boston Public Schools. My scholarship brings light to a much broader and more nuanced history of racial politics in Boston and demonstrates that we cannot understand the period of court-ordered desegregation without examining the decades of grassroots activism which preceded it.