February is Black History month which honors the contributions that Black Americans have made to the culture and history of the United States.  UTA Libraries provides researchers access to many resources that highlight the achievements of Black Americans and document the work of preserving the history of Black communities for future generations.

Changing the face of music and theater

For thousands of years, humans have turned to music as a form of self-expression.  In Music Online: African American Music Reference you can explore how Black Americans have pioneered once novel genres like hip hop and contributed to more established musical traditions.  Search for the book I Dream a World: The Operas of William Grant Still by Beverly Soll to learn about the titular composer’s efforts to break into the world of opera.  Despite his mother’s wishes that he become a doctor, Still was drawn to music and taught himself to play multiple instruments while still a teenager.  Today he is mostly known for his orchestral compositions, but during his lifetime he longed to be recognized for writing operas, a form of music that he had dearly loved since childhood.  When the New York Opera performed Still’s Troubled Island in 1949, it was the first opera by a Black American to be performed by a major company and the first opera by any American composer that the company had ever staged. 

Today, the rise of popular musicals such as Hamilton has generated many conversations about Black Americans in the theater arts.  The database Digital Theater Plus includes high quality filmed theater productions as well as interviews with performers, writers, and creative teams.  In an interview titled Black Artists on Inclusivity in Musical Theatre, writer and director George C. Wolfe and actor Nikki Renée Daniels discuss how Black artists have challenged the norms of musical theater with practices such as colorblind casting and the reinterpretation of Black characters written by non-Black playwrights.  This resource also includes the essay A Concise Introduction to African American Theatre for those who need a primer for exploring this topic.

Leading so that others can follow

Multiple databases available through UTA include access to the journal article “The Struggle is Real”: The life history of a groundbreaking African American, female basketball coach by authors Richard F. Jowers and Matthew D. Curtner-Smith.  At the time of the study, 45% of the women playing on college basketball teams identified as African American, but only 10% of college level head coaches were African American women.  The two researchers conducted interviews with Dana “Pokey” Chatman who began coaching children’s basketball teams in 1990 while still an undergraduate at Louisiana State University. She eventually became head coach at LSU, and during her tenure, her teams won 85% of their games and reached the Final Four of the NCAA three times.  Pokey went on to successfully coach multiple other teams.  During her interviews, Pokey discusses the challenges she faced and her optimism that she and others have “pulled a big chair back for somebody to sit in” paving the way for more Black women to become professional coaches.

The magazine Black Enterprise has been covering the innovations and success stories of Black Americans in a wide array of fields since the 1970s.  In EBSCO Business Source Complete you can explore full issues from 1990 to 2019 and abstracts dating back to 1984.  The November/December 2018 issue highlights program developer Frederick Hutson, who successfully launched a tech platform called Pigeonly to help incarcerated individuals maintain connections with their loved ones.  Hutson knew from his own incarceration experience that there are many barriers to maintaining social ties while in prison, and that being cut off from the outside world negatively impacts outcomes after release.  At the time the article was written, he had raised more than $5 million in capital from Silicon Valley investors.  The Pigeonly platform is still active today, allowing inmates to more easily receive letters, photos, phone calls, and money from friends and family.  Huston describes his entrepreneurship as a driver of criminal justice reform and hopes that his experience provides a springboard for others saying “I think there’s more than enough talented entrepreneurs and people out there that are willing, have the resources, and have the passion to tackle all these different issues.  They just need foundation to build on.” 

Preserving the past

To build a better future, we must understand where we came from.  Groups all over the United States have been working for decades to preserve Black historic sites.  In the database African American Communities search for “Weeksville” and you will find primary documents related to the Weeksville Community in the Brooklyn area of New York. Weeksville was a free Black community founded in 1838 by James Weeks, a formerly enslaved dockworker, and other free Black property owners.  This was just 11 years after slavery was abolished in New York and almost 30 years before the end of the Civil War in 1865.  The residents created a fully functioning community that included a newspaper, retirement home, hospital, churches, schools, and more. 

In 1968, four intact Weeksville houses were identified, and the effort to preserve them began.  The database includes issues of the “Weeksville Newsletter” ranging from 1970 to 1984.  This newsletter was published by the Society for the Preservation of Weeksville and Bedford-Stuyvesant History and documents their efforts to save the remaining houses, collect archival materials related to the community, and educate the public on the importance of preserving this time in history.  The houses and collections eventually became part of the Weeksville Heritage Center.     

Remembering The Hill

Preserving the past has always required the efforts of many people including journalists, historians, archivists, and local community members.  Just north of the UTA campus is a five-block area known as The Hill.  This historically Black neighborhood began forming after the Civil War.  By the 1930s, The Hill included 28 Black households and continued to grow.  In the face of strict social and physical segregation, the residents established their own churches, schools, restaurants, and night clubs.  Search in the Arlington Morning News database for the February 10, 2002 edition and you will find an interview with Carl Pointer who grew up in The Hill during the 1950s and 60s.  Pointer describes many moments from his childhood when segregation limited the services that residents had access to.  To go to a movie, receive hospital care, or attend high school Black residents of Arlington had to go to Fort Worth. 

Arlington schools integrated when Pointer was entering the seventh grade.  In the interview, he describes the difference between Nicols Junior High and Booker T. Washington School, where Black students attended before integration.  “The thing that shocked me when I got to Nichols was when we saw films and film strips…I'd never seen that before. And at Booker T., we didn't have a gymnasium or any band instruments."  Pointer faced social challenges in his new school because there were so few Black students, and older teens would often call him names and throw things as they drove past him walking home along Cooper Street. 

Pointer went on to become a popular high school football player and earned his political science degree from UTA in 1977.  Pointer said he didn’t resent growing up with segregation because it taught him to recognize the negative impact that ignorance has on society.  In his words, “I believe people who know better, do better.” If you want to learn more about the history of the The Hill, including significant neighborhood landmarks, check out this Storymap. 

If you need assistance accessing these, or any other UTA resource, reach out to a subject librarian. We are always happy to help.

The cover image for this blog post is from the University of Texas at Arlington News Service Photograph Collection.  It depicts Rodney Lewis and Wanda Jo Holiday, University of Texas at Arlington Homecoming King and Queen, 1980. Holiday became the first Black student to be elected Homecoming Queen at UTA and Lewis, also a Black student, became the first UTA Homecoming King in the school's history.  Special collections identifier AR387-9-19.