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Mar. 1 | 2012 Franklin Prize
Nominations for 2012 John Hope Franklin Publication Prize for the best-published book in American Studies due
Mar. 1 | 2012 Romero Prize
Nominations for 2012 Lora Romero Publication Prize for the best-published first book in American Studies due
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Caldwell, Kimberly M. "From Africatown (Alabama) to 'Out Stickney;' Reminiscences of a Toledo, Ohio African-American Community, 1919-1960," Bowling Green State University, December 2001.
The focus of this project is specifically aimed at telling the history of Black Stickney as it is recounted by its residents both former and current. Stickney’s black community came to be as a result of the Great Migration-the exodus of African Americans out of the southern United States into its northern cities-that occurred from the nineteen-teens until the middle nineteen fifties. At the center of this study is the story of the Henry Lawson Sr. family. The Lawson children, by virtue of their mother’s bloodlines, are the descendants of Charlee Lewis, who, along with his brother Cudjoe and other members of the West African Tarkar people, comprised the human contraband of the schooner Clotilda or Clotilde, purported to be the last cargo of Africans brought to the United States in 1859. The Tarkar peoples desire to return to their homeland was so fervent that they, in an attempt to recreate an environment similar to that found in their motherland, established the AfricaTown community near Mobile, Alabama of which Lewis Quarter, the Lewis family headquarters was a part. Cudjoe Lewis, who frequently served as spokesman of Tarkar people, described the dilemma facing America’s transplanted Africans. He explained that while they longed for their African homeland, they also over time and primarily because of having kinsmen in the United States, developed an affinity for this country. Likewise, the Lawsons and other black migrants from the South shared a comparable dilemma. Despite racism and economic hardships, their loyalties would be split between families and homesteads left behind in the South and their new communities and social ties in the North. In particular, the Lawson family challenge extended beyond simple sentimental ties to the South to include the question of the cultural identity as Africans. Since they were among blacks who had knowledge of the specific origins their African lineage, the inherent question in the move North was whether they could retain the memory and practice of the African past and cultural identity. Though an important one, the Lawsons’ is but one of the many stories of Stickney families. Even though the community existed from the pre-nineteen-teens to the present, their is little written documentation. Therefore this study is by design and necessity an oral history. It is a reconstructed narrative extracted from oral interviews, conversations, review of newspapers, and other periodicals on the history of the Stickney community and is told from the perspective of the individuals that lived there from the 1920s until 1960.
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