Study Grant Proposal for Summer 2008
Readings in African-American and Italian-American History, 1830-present
Keith Volanto
Office Phone: 972-578-5531
Email: kvolanto@ccccd.edu
Readings in African-American and Italian-American History, 1830-present
Over the past year, I have become interested in tracing the genealogy of my
family and my wife’s family. Thus far, my search has been successful in identifying
many of our ancestors. In the case of my family, which is largely Italian-American, I
have been able to trace all of my family members going back to their arrival at Ellis
Island in the 1890s and 1900s. The search for my wife’s ancestors, who were AfricanAmerican, has been more difficult. Nevertheless, I have been able to identify members
of most lines of the family as far back as the Civil War, including one line that I have
been able to trace as far back as the 1830s in Tennessee.
But identifying individuals from a census record or a ship manifest is only part of
what interests me about these people—I yearn to learn more about their lives, not only for
myself and my family’s benefit, but also for my students. Whenever I tie in information
that I have gathered about my family or my wife’s family in order make points about
certain historical topics that we are covering in class, my students display heightened
interest and often express desire to learn more about what members of their own families
may have been doing at the same time.
If awarded a study grant, I wish to explore important aspects of the lives of these
relatives by reading relevant scholarly literature. The earliest of my wife’s ancestors, for
example, was a free black couple living in Tennessee during the 1830s. I would like to
learn more about what historians have written on the lives of free blacks living in that
state during the antebellum years. Another example involves my first relatives who
emigrated from southern Italy and Sicily. Most of their first jobs in Paterson, New
Jersey, where they initially resided, were in the silk factories of that sprawling industrial
city. From the census records I know what their occupations were, but next-to-nothing
about how they performed their jobs, what their working conditions were like, the state of
management-labor relations in that industry, etc. Thus, some readings in labor history
and the silk industry of Paterson should fill in many important gaps in my understanding
of these issues.
In addition to adding to my knowledge of these historical areas in general and
these people in particular for lecture enhancement, I hope to meld what I have learned
from my genealogical research with my study grant readings to produce a set of readings
that I could assign to my classes for discussion and homework assignments. If all goes
well, I should also have enough information to present papers at scholarly conferences
and possibly publish a book on the lives of each generation of the families that could
certainly be used in survey courses.
Although the study grant would be for the Summer II session, I intend to read
throughout Summer I and Summer II so the schedule shown below reflects an eight-week
plan rather than a five-week program.
Reading Schedule:
Weeks 1-2
I will start out with a look into the world of my wife’s oldest known ancestors: her
great-great grandfather & great-great grandmother (on her mother’s side) – William and
Rachel Conner – both were Tennessee free blacks born in 1814 and 1829, respectively.
For this exploration I will begin by reading Ira Berlin’s classic Slaves Without Masters:
The Free Negro in the Antebellum South and Lester Lamon’s Blacks in Tennessee,
1791-1970. Both works should explain the major issues faced by the Conners and other
free blacks in Tennessee during the antebellum years. I will supplement these readings
by perusing relevant essays in Robert Booker’s edited volume The History of Blacks in
Knoxville, Tennessee: The First Hundred Years, 1791-1891 (Rachel moved her family
of six sons and one daughter to Knoxville after William died in 1866) and re-reading
portions of Herbert Gutman’s The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925.
Weeks 3-4
During the next two weeks I would like to focus on my wife’s ancestors in Texas
during the postbellum period. After the Civil War, many members of the Conner family
eventually migrated to the Lone Star State. In addition, the first members of my wife’s
family on her father’s side begin entering the historical record in Texas during the 1870s.
To understand the lives of these people, I would like to read the following books:
first, The Conners of Waco: Black Professionals in 20th Century Texas, a 1991 Ph.D.
dissertation by Virginia Spurlin (Texas Tech) which surveys the life of my wife’s greatuncle George Sherman Conner (the youngest son of William and Rachel, born in 1864)
who became a prominent doctor in Waco, and his wife Jeffie who became a well-known
agricultural extension service agent and civil rights activist. Next, I would like to
examine Thomas Ward’s Black Physicians in the Jim Crow South, 1880–1960 which
will give a good overview of the educational experience of black doctors, as well as the
rewards and pitfalls that came with being an African American physician during the years
of segregation. This will not only help me better understand the life of George Conner,
but also that of his nephew, my wife’s grandfather Beadie Conner, who idolized his uncle
and later became a noteworthy doctor in Austin’s black community.
With regard to my wife’s father’s side of the family, I have been able to trace that
line as far back as the Reconstruction years in Limestone County, Texas. My wife’s
paternal great-grandfather, James Edward Youngblood, was somehow able to earn
enough money to purchase 40 acres of land there and settle down with a growing family
starting in the early 1880s. A good book to help understand the Youngbloods’ lives will
be Walter Cotton’s History of Negroes of Limestone County. This small book (67
pages) written in the 1930s is packed with local history and invaluable personal
information on many families in the county who emerged from slavery. Although the
Youngbloods are not discussed in detail, there is a photo in the book showing Oscar
Youngblood, one of James’s sons, working the fields with a caption mentioning that he is
the son of James Youngblood, a successful local black farmer with over 200 acres of
land.
Finally, I would like to peruse chapters in survey books dealing with blacks in
Texas, focusing on the years 1865-1940: Lawrence Rice’s The Negro in Texas: 18741900, Alwyn Barr’s Black Texans: A History of African Americans in Texas, 15281995 and The African Texans, and David Williams’s Bricks Without Straw: A
Comprehensive History of African Americans in Texas.
Weeks 5-6
For the next two weeks, I would like to shift gears and start looking at literature
dealing with my Italian ancestors. My father’s side of the family came to the U.S. from a
small village outside Naples in southern Italy. My mother’s side of the family came to
America from Sicily. All of my relatives migrated in the late-1890s and early-1900s and
every one of them came through Ellis Island. To better understand what drove and/or
lured them to the United States and what they experienced when they immediately
arrived, I will begin by reviewing relevant chapters of three important books: Franc
Sturino’s Forging the Chain: Italian Migration to North America, 1880-1930, John
W. Briggs’s An Italian Passage: Immigrants to Three American Cities, 1890-1930,
and A. Kenneth Ciongoli and Jay Parini’s Passage to Liberty: The Story of Italian
Immigration and the Rebirth of America.
Many of my newly-arrived ancestors and their children worked in the silk
factories of Paterson, New Jersey, so I would like to better understand how they worked
and lived by reading a couple of important works on Paterson’s silk business: first, a
series of essays in Phillip Scranton’s (ed.) Silk City: Studies on the Paterson Silk
Industry, 1860-1940, followed by Steve Golin’s The Fragile Bridge: The Paterson
Silk Strike of 1913. Though I am not sure of their roles, if any, in this great labor
showdown, some of my relatives, especially my grandfather, were heavily influenced by
the early 20th-century labor movement. This book should help describe that relationship
while also giving me a better feel for the times in which these people were living.
Weeks 7-8
I would like to end my reading by exploring aspects of Italian acculturation and
economic advancement so I can better understand how, simply put, I got to be where I am
today rather than being poor, working in a New Jersey factory, and speaking with a heavy
Italian accent! Though there are many books that explore the profound changes which
occurred among Italian-Americans during the twentieth century, among the two that have
received the best reviews are Richard Alba’s Italian Americans into the Twilight of
Ethnicity and Joseph Lopreato’s Italian Americans.
I will read both books before concluding my study with a book describing what I
feel is the most important law to directly affect my family’s economic life: the
Servicemen's Readjustment Act, better known as the GI Bill. As a result of this
legislation, my father (after his service in the Korean War) was able to become the first
member of either his family or my mother’s family to go to college. Upon graduation
with an engineering degree, my parents left New Jersey and started life anew in
California with a steady job and a brighter future. Millions of American families, many
of them with recent-immigrant backgrounds, were able to take advantage of this law. I
wish to learn more about how it came about and its overall impact on the nation. From
my scanning of scholarly reviews, the book with the best reputation on the subject is
Keith Olson’s The GI Bill, the Veterans, and the Colleges.
Reading List
Alba, Richard, Italian Americans into the Twilight of Ethnicity, New Jersey: PrenticeHall, 1985.
Barr, Alwyn, Black Texans: A History of African Americans in Texas, 1528-1995,
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996.
Barr, Alwyn, The African Texans, College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004.
Berlin, Ira, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South, New York:
New Press, 1974.
Booker, Robert (ed.) The History of Blacks in Knoxville, Tennessee: The First Hundred
Years, 1791-1891, Knoxville: Beck Cultural Exchange Center, 1990.
Briggs, John W., An Italian Passage: Immigrants to Three American Cities, 1890-1930,
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978.
Ciongoli, A. Kenneth and Jay Parini, Passage to Liberty: The Story of Italian
Immigration and the Rebirth of America, New York: Regan Books, 2002.
Cotton, Walter, History of Negroes of Limestone County, Mexia, TX: Chatman and
Merriwether, 1939.
Golin, Steve, The Fragile Bridge: The Paterson Silk Strike of 1913, Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1988.
Gutman, Herbert, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925, New York:
Pantheon Books, 1976.
Lamon, Lester, Blacks in Tennessee, 1791-1970, Knoxville: University of Tennessee
Press, 1981.
Lopreato, Joseph, Italian Americans, New York: Random House, 1970.
Olson, Keith, The GI Bill, the Veterans, and the Colleges, Lexington: University of
Kentucky Press, 1974.
Rice, Lawrence, The Negro in Texas: 1874-1900, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1971.
Scranton, Phillip (ed.), Silk City: Studies on the Paterson Silk Industry, 1860-1940,
Newark: New Jersey Historical Society, 1985.
Spurlin, Virginia, The Conners of Waco: Black Professionals in 20th Century Texas,
(Ph.D. diss, Texas Tech University, 1991)
Sturino, Franc, Forging the Chain: Italian Migration to North America, 1880-1930,
Toronto: Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1990.
Ward, Thomas J., Black Physicians in the Jim Crow South, 1880–1960, Fayetteville:
University of Arkansas Press, 2003.
Williams, David A. (ed.), Bricks Without Straw: A Comprehensive History of African
Americans in Texas, Austin: Eakin Press, 1997.