Era Bell Thompson: Observations of an American Daughter on the American South and the African Congo

Abstract

This dissertation asks how author and journalist Era Bell Thompson understood and constructed her racial identity against the historical context of the connections between the American South and the Congo. Thompson's unique childhood on the Great Plains of North Dakota and her long-time residence in Chicago offer a new perspective on race and history outside the American South or European colonialism. Using Thompson's autobiography, American Daughter, and her African travelogue, Africa, Land of My Fathers, the dissertation uses her writing as both a lens and a mirror. African American newspapers and periodicals, particularly The Chicago Defender, are important to the project as many of Thompson's early ideas about the American South germinated from the paper's front page headlines. Throughout the dissertation poetry is utilized to convey the moment and the mood. Historical connections between the American South and Congo beginning in the early 1800s provide important historical context. The outcry against the brutality of King Leopold II's Congo Free State at the beginning of the twentieth century is connected to outcries against the American Congo, featured headlines in 1919 and 1920.