Funk music is a fundamentally crucial genre when discussing the history of Black music genres. This genre was created at a time of extreme change for the Black community in the United States. Civil rights laws were passed to give voting rights and fair housing to the newly integrated citizens. Although the political and social climates of the late 1960s and 1970s seemed to end racial issues on the law books, it did not change the cultural climate of the USA, meaning the Black struggle in America would continue. During the post-civil rights and Black power eras, music genre’s soul and rock had been transformed into the groovy, dirty noise of funk music. Funk music was a platform for Black musicians to have a voice in the historical moment of the 1970s. Little scholarship has been written on funk music as a critical Black genre. Looking into the musicians who performed funk, the state of Black Americans in the 1970s, and other Black genres will show how funk stayed historically relevant throughout time as a genre for and by Black people. My presentation will showcase lyrical analysis, an evolution of funk, and the historical events that coincided with it. 

The purpose of this research is to uncover the experiences of queer Black girls during the first half of the twentieth century. At a time when Black people were defining, understanding, and questioning what it meant to be Black in America, I query what queer Black girlhood looked like during this time. Black girlhood historians agree that Black girls during the first half of the twentieth century regularly faced the sexualization and adultification (the attribution of adult characteristics onto young people) of their bodies and the impartation of respectability politics by the Black community. This research investigates the ways in which these politics played out in conjunction with the homosexual identity. How did respectability fail queer Black girls? How did respectability liberate queer Black girls? In doing this work, I employ Black queer theory as a theoretical framework, as well as rely on oral histories due to the erasure of queer Black women’s experience in dominant discourse.

The Civil Rights era was greatly impacted by Muhammad Ali’s resistance to westernized European social norms and protest against racial prejudice in the mid-1900s. Ali undergoes a series of changes of his identity and asserts himself as Muslim activist, using his athletic background as the foundation of his platform. Ali utilized the media to gain public attention about his political views and manipulated the media to gain support in the anti-war efforts promoted by Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam. This topic is historically relevant because it explains the impact of religion in social and political protest lead by African Americans during the Civil Rights Movement. It is also relevant because it offers an explanation of the protest of current African American athletes like Colin Kaepernick in the height of the Black Lives Matter Movement. My research will dissect the tactics Ali used to signify himself as a political activst and how these same traits can be found in athletes of the present. It is also historically significant because it adds to the body of knowledge concerning how the Nation of Islam was a positive source of influence to motivate political, economic, and religious change in the Black community.

The purpose of this research is to understand the ways in which social justice movements such as the Civil Rights Movement and Black Panther Party Movement influenced the depictions of African-American women in American cinema by examining the 1930s, 1950s, and 1970s. By examining the themes of American films starring African-American women from the 1930s throughout the 1970s, I was able to find that the social justice movements of the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Panther Party Movement heavily influenced the images shown on screen. From a realistic depiction of an African-American family without the use of stereotypes such as the Mammy, Jezebel, and Sapphire in A Raisin in the Sun to an image of an African-American woman with a large afro, fighting crime in urban centers in the United States in Coffy, American social movements heavily influenced the normalized portrayals of African-American women in American society.