Black settlers? Anthony W. Wood, Forty Years within the Veil: The Black West and Counternarratives of Race and Place in the Rocky Mountains, PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 2024 | settler colonial studies blog

Black settlers? Anthony W. Wood, Forty Years within the Veil: The Black West and Counternarratives of Race and Place in the Rocky Mountains, PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 2024

09Sep24

Abstract: In the years between the end of Greater Reconstruction and the start of the Great Migration, Black Americans founded communities across the Rocky Mountain West. Many of these towns prospered and grew during an era in which racial ideologies underwent profound realignment. As numerous scholars of race document, both national and regional politics along with cultural forces shaped how race was made and remade in America between 1877 and the 1920s. Black settlers in new western cities and towns navigated the ongoing social construction of race and the effects of racism in their everyday lives while participating in the co-constructing forces of place-making where they lived and made their homes. This dissertation focuses on three Rocky Mountain towns, Pueblo, Colorado, Pocatello, Idaho, and Cheyenne, Wyoming, as instructive and heretofore unstudied sites where the Black West might be grounded by a place-based analysis. Doing so allows us to better understand not only how, but where, race was made in America. In order for histories of Black western communities to offer such insights, the chapters in the second part of this dissertation argue that place-based studies of Black communities must consider and contextualize, rather than foreclose, the variegated narratives and counternarratives of the West’s incredible ethnic, religious, and racial heterogeneity. Linking the local Black histories in Part I with broader local analysis of the racialized politics of belonging and place-making, Part II urges historians of race, African Americans, and the North American West to be attentive to both the locality and relationality of racial formations.

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