Graduation Semester and Year
Fall 2025
Language
English
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy in History
Department
History
First Advisor
Kenyon Zimmer
Second Advisor
Stephanie Cole
Third Advisor
W. Marvin Dulaney
Abstract
This dissertation demonstrates the utility of the term enclavism as an alternative conceptual category for “black nationalism” to characterize African American community-centered intellectual projects designed to achieve race advancement and mainstream inclusion. I apply enclavism to examine the Dallas Express, the most widely distributed African American news periodical in the American Southwest throughout the first half of the twentieth century. My project assesses how the Express staff, as a subset of racialized people in Dallas, Texas, attempted to foster an idea that African American Texans were a community that was distinguishable from other racialized groups, including whites and other African Americans, but who also assumed inter-regional, inter-cultural, interracial, and international coalitions with other populations to accomplish their political, economic, and cultural objectives. My projects also examines how the Express editors presupposed a degree of self-reliance and resource mobilization as part of their overwhelmingly patriotic appeals for mainstream inclusion. I argue that the Express editors engineered cultural, political, and economic projects designed to create and to foster in-group sentiments among its readers in the 1920s and the 1960s. I also argue that the Express editors fostered a notion of enclavism that took for granted white readers and white allies who could help them to accomplish many aspects of their platform. Finally, I argue that the Express editors presented a framework for race advancement that treated enclavism as a means through which they could achieve assimilation rather than as an end unto itself that would have reinforced the limitations of racial caste.
Keywords
Dallas Express, African American, Dallas, Newspaper, Enclavism, African American Press, Civil Rights, Race Advancement
Disciplines
United States History
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Guillory, J. Anthony, "Enclavism and Public Opinion in the Dallas Express in the 1920s and 1960s" (2025). History Dissertations. 80.
https://mavmatrix.uta.edu/history_dissertations/80