Journal of Black Studies

This study explores the relationship between the federal Title I program and Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). In this study, I reviewed publicly available admission data across five HBCUs by reviewing websites, reports, and obtaining data from the Universities. The article examines the complicated origins of the Title I legislation and HBCUs and argues for a more intentional and strategic relationship given the historical and relational connection of the students served. The findings highlight a large number of students graduating from Title I schools are attending HBCUs. Furthermore, this article presents several policy recommendations to support the original intent of the Title I legislation while addressing some of the complex systems of oppression and discursive practices in the process of policy formulation.

A PipelineFor the Success of Underserved Students

In this study I analyzed the findings through the lens of Amartya Sen’s capability approach for social justice. Incorporating Amartya Sen’s capability approach when assessing the relationship between HBCUs and Title I provides a broader, multi-criteria framework that answers the need for a normative ideal. I propose Amartya Sen’s capability approach as a way of expanding the conversation around Title I and HBCUs as important to contributing to the quality of life and connecting this issue to a wider discussion centered around educating kids of poverty. Applying Amartya Sen’s capability approach to the HBCU-Title I enrollment data may provide a powerful framework for understanding social justice dimensions, as the capability approach integrates social justice into the list of priorities and prompts questions around building a more just society, while taking into account human dignity and well-being for all.

This article explores the lasting impacts of slavery across the African diaspora, using insights from international symposia organized by the UNESCO Slave Routes Project and recent reparations summits in Ghana. The research highlights both positive and negative community legacies passed down through generations via socialization. Positive legacies include cultural continuity through music and spirituality, adaptable family structures, verbal ingenuity, economic independence strategies, and collective resistance mechanisms that supported survival and resilience. Negative legacies remain as obstacles to current well-being, such as harsh child discipline, colorism, systemic division and distrust, self-deprecation, problematic use of racial epithets, and patterns of intraracial violence. The article presents Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome (PTSS) as a framework for understanding how these interconnected behaviors originate from unaddressed historical trauma and persist through community and family socialization. Drawing from therapeutic practices in Jamaica and Colombia, the authors suggest community psychological decolonization as a key approach to healing, supported by individual and family interventions that target the fundamental causes of trauma-related behaviors. While external racism continues to be the main obstacle to progress, addressing internalized oppression through systematic healing is crucial for genuine liberation and post-traumatic growth. The article emphasizes that lasting progress depends on both honesty about historical injustices and concrete actions to reform systems that sustain inequality, representing a continuous journey of healing, understanding, and systemic transformation across individuals, communities, and institutions.

This article examines the NAACP’s campaign against police brutality from 1937 to 1965, drawing on over 90 case files from the association’s national archives. Using a Critical Race Theory framework, it analyzes how the NAACP developed investigatory, judicial, and media tactics to counteract systematic racial abuse in the absence of state accountability. The study identifies a shift from reactive legalism to a more expansive activism model that blended evidence collection, public exposure, and community-driven narratives to challenge official impunity. Despite the 1945 Screws v. United States decision, which theoretically expanded federal authority, the Department of Justice consistently declined to pursue prosecution, forcing the NAACP to develop alternative accountability mechanisms. This multi-level organizational approach, shaped by tactical adaptation and bureaucratic learning, demonstrates the power of administrative infrastructure in sustaining civil rights work beyond landmark court cases. By focusing on how the NAACP treated police brutality as both a constitutional and epistemic crisis, the article illuminates broader implications for understanding organizational memory, movement strategy, and the ongoing struggle for racial justice in hostile legal environments.

How the NAACP Fought Police Brutality Before the Civil Rights Act and What It Means for Today

Between 1937 and 1965, Black Americans faced routine police violence with almost no government accountability, and this study draws on more than ninety case files from the NAACP’s national archives to show how the organization responded. Early on, the NAACP relied mainly on legal action after incidents occurred, but over time it built a broader system: gathering and standardizing evidence, supporting community members in documenting abuses, and working with journalists to bring those stories to public attention. When a 1945 Supreme Court decision (Screws v. United States) appeared to give the federal government greater authority to prosecute abusive officers, the Department of Justice still refused to act, forcing the NAACP to deepen its own accountability infrastructure instead. What the case files reveal across these decades is careful, cumulative learning, as the organization kept detailed records, revisited earlier cases, and carried those lessons forward in ways that made it faster and more effective over time. By treating police violence as both a legal problem and a question of whose accounts were believed and whose were dismissed, the NAACP sustained a long campaign in a deeply hostile environment, offering lessons about organizational persistence and community-driven accountability that remain relevant to reform efforts today.

This study pays specific attention to co-parenting conflict in Trinidad, one of the countries that comprise a small twin island state (Trinidad and Tobago). Empirical research on co-parenting conflict in Trinidad’s cultural context remains limited particularly concerning the nature of Afro-Trinidadian co-parental conflict post-separation and divorce. This study explores the nature of co-parenting conflict among Afro-Trinidadian families following divorce or separation. Data was collected using qualitative methods that comprised 13 semi-structured interviews with co-parents who would have parented at least one child following the dissolution of the relationship. Participants were recruited via a flyer posted on social media, snowball, and purposive sampling methods. Thematic analysis was employed and themes derived formed soundbites that highlighted conflictual issues around co-parenting among Afro-Trinidadians. Findings reveal that while co-parenting conflict is often shaped by interpersonal tensions, it is also deeply influenced by broader issues such as finances, gender expectations, disciplinary practices, decisions about education and the cultural impact of social support, which all intersect with communication. This research contributes to a growing body of literature that seeks to contextualize co-parenting within culturally specific frameworks. By amplifying voices overlooked in mainstream discourse, the study provides critical insights into how conflict is experienced and navigated by Afro-Trinidadian co-parents and offers recommendations for promoting healthier co-parenting relationships and child outcomes within Trinidad. Further, there are implications for Trinidad and Tobago, to employ community programs around co-parenting and re-energize traditional family values, as well as engage in continuous research and collaboration with macro society to address co-parental conflict in a productive manner.

Domestic work is a pillar of Brazil’s racial capitalism. The profession is widely recognized as a legacy of enslavement that keeps approximately 7 million people—most of whom are black women—in social and economic captivity. Like in Anna Muylaert’s film Que horas ela volta? (The Second Mother, Anna Muylaert, 2015), Solitária (“Lonely” 2022), by Eliana Alves Cruz, depicts domestic work as a social evil to be eradicated. Moreover, Cruz fictionalizes the death of 5-year-old Miguel Otávio Santana da Silva, underscoring the tragic consequences of negligence by his mother’s employer. In this study, I argue that Cruz uses spatial images to advocate for the end of domestic work and to criticize nation-building projects that profit from the exploitation of Black women. I explore Afropessimist theories, which critique the foundational role of anti-blackness in sustaining social structures, alongside the works of Carolina Maria de Jesus, Beatriz Nascimento, and Lélia Gonzalez. I explore the discourse on Afropessimism in Brazil. Like the solitary confinement that gives its name to Cruz’s novel, spaces of containment can promote anti-Black violence. Afropessimism questions the liberatory capabilities of different spaces by recognizing Black suffering as necessary for the maintenance of current power structures.

Domestic Work and the Afropessimist Geographies of Suffering in Brazilian Literature

This study analyzes how the Afro-Brazilian author Eliane Alves Cruz’ Solitária (“Solitary,” 2022) uses spatial imagery to advocate for the abolition of domestic work and critique nation-building projects that profit from the exploitation of Black women. As Cruz’ novel fictionalizes the death of five-year-old Miguel Otávio Santana da Silva (2014-2020), I argue that Solitária helps unveil the foundational role of anti-blackness in sustaining social structures. Solitária shows the inescapability of Afropessimism, a theoretical framework on how societies are structured around anti-Black violence. Because Afropessimism is such a contentious theoretical framework, it is crucial that academia discusses its manifestations in other territories and establishes dialogs on the reality of it.

This study explores how the documentary Good Hair functions as a mediated counter-narrative, influencing the modern natural hair movement among Black women. Using multi-method qualitative approaches—textual analysis of viewer reviews, a focus group with Black women, and an interview with a natural hair care expert—we examine the film’s impact on perceptions of beauty, identity, and health. Findings reveal that Good Hair provided viewers with a sense of awareness, liberation, and validation, prompting cultural dialogue and in some cases, behavior change. The film challenged dominant beauty norms and inspired reflection on hair practices historically shaped by Eurocentric standards. Through these responses, we argue that Good Hair serves not only as a cultural artifact but as an educational tool that catalyzed change within Black communities. We position it within the framework of mediated counter-narratives.

This study examines how the documentary Good Hair influenced conversations about Black women’s hair, beauty standards, and identity. Using viewer reviews, a focus group with Black women, and an interview with a natural hair expert, the study explores how the film encouraged audiences to reconsider harmful beauty ideals rooted in Eurocentric standards. Findings suggest that Good Hair helped many viewers feel validated in embracing natural hairstyles while also increasing awareness about the cultural, emotional, and health implications of hair practices such as chemical relaxers. The study argues that the film contributed to broader discussions surrounding the natural hair movement and Black women’s representation in media.

This article offers a comparative analysis of Frederick Douglass and Phillis Wheatley, two pivotal figures whose divergent pathways to literacy reveal the multifaceted role of the written word as a tool of liberation. Douglass’s insurgent self-education, forged in defiance of slavery’s prohibitions, transformed literacy into a public weapon for political change. Wheatley’s poetic diplomacy, cultivated within the constraints of white patronage, employed classical forms, and theological rhetoric to subtly destabilize racial hierarchies. Drawing on Deborah Brandt’s theory of literacy sponsorship, this study examines how each navigated the opportunities and limitations imposed by their historical contexts, converting sponsored literacy into acts of resistance. Douglass’s strategy of public confrontation, through autobiographies, speeches, and editorial work, contrasts with Wheatley’s layered appeals to moral universality embedded in neoclassical verse. Both, however, asserted Black intellectual agency in spaces designed to exclude it. Their distinct approaches are situated within the broader Black Atlantic intellectual tradition, where African-descended peoples have balanced overt defiance and strategic subtlety in literary and rhetorical expression. The article also connects these historical models to contemporary debates on educational justice, curriculum censorship, and culturally sustaining pedagogy. By framing literacy as both a political project and a survival strategy, this study underscores its enduring significance for dismantling systemic oppression and envisioning equitable futures.

Insurgent Words, Poetic Diplomacy: Frederick Douglass, Phillis Wheatley, and Literacy as Liberation

This article explores how Frederick Douglass and Phillis Wheatley, two remarkable Black writers born into slavery in different centuries, used reading and writing as acts of resistance and freedom. For both, literacy was more than a skill; it was a way to claim humanity, build community, and challenge systems designed to keep Black people powerless. Douglass secretly taught himself to read and write in defiance of laws that punished enslaved people for learning. His words, spoken and written, helped inspire the movement to abolish slavery. Wheatley, taken from West Africa to colonial Boston as a child, became the first African American woman to publish a book of poetry. Her work used the language of religion and classical literature to question the moral hypocrisy of a society that preached liberty while keeping people enslaved. After emancipation, the hunger for education that Douglass and Wheatley embodied spread across Black communities. Freedpeople built schools, founded historically Black colleges and universities, and viewed learning as a pathway to freedom and equality. Today, their legacies remind us that literacy is never neutral. It is a form of power, one that continues to shape struggles for racial justice, educational equity, and self-determination. By writing themselves into history, Douglass and Wheatley opened doors for generations who understood that learning is both a personal victory and a collective act of liberation.

In this essay the author introduces the emergence of the paddy rollers as control forces to contain the black population during the enslavement of Africans in the United States. Soon after the end of the Civil War the police forces took over the activities that had been the purvey of the paddy rollers: keeping black people in place and out of the way of white people. However, the resistance to abuse, torture, and murder was never far from the active imagination and reality of African Americans who maintained their own humanity. Tracing, in a limited fashion, how the biologically unscientific race became the premise for racism and the attacks on black people by police officers who often took their perceptions of blacks, especially black men, as negative and inferior from the systemic and institutional character of the society’s understanding of superior and inferior humans. This, according to the author, is at the base of hatred, discrimination, and lynching of African Americans in current and previous occasions. He illustrates this by discussing the case of Mary Turner who was killed in the early part of the 20^th century for objecting to white mob attacks on her husband.

Few journals in the social sciences have published as much over the past twenty years on the reality of racial, cultural, and social inequality in law and practice as the Journal of Black Studies. In this special issue edited in the 50^th year of the journal we have initiated a series related to the evolution of human relations that considers where we have been and what we need to arrive at the place where we should be. In this issue we look at the presence of violence against African descended people, the mediations of people, laws, and processes intervening in the nature of our interactions in order to establish a more humane future. This issue should allow teachers, scholars and students to re-evaluate and re-examine their own set of assumptions, actions, and potentialities in regard to humanity.