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The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History

400 years later, America still has so much to learn about its racial history

By Editors' Choice

By Lonnie Bunch, The Washington Post — In his influential treatise on race, “The Fire Next Time,” James Baldwin wrote, “To accept one’s past — one’s history — is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.” Baldwin’s words…

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A police officer aims his weapon after demonstrators

Haiti protesters ask the international community to stop supporting their president

By News & Current Affairs

By Jacqueline Charles, Miami Herald — A massive crowd of anti-government protesters in Haiti cranked up the pressure for President Jovenel Moïse to step down Friday, taking their resignation demands to the United Nation’s peacekeeping headquarters in Port-au-Prince, where they asked the international community to stop supporting the country’s leader. Tying up traffic in front of Toussaint Louverture International Airport, the demonstrators — who later burned tires in front of…

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Students at Georgetown University have called on the school to create a fund to help descendants of enslaved people sold in the 19th century.

Georgetown students protest, demanding action on reparations for descendants of enslaved people

By News & Current Affairs, Reparations

By Lauren Lumpkin and Susan Svrluga, The Washington Post — A couple dozen Georgetown University students broke into a chant Thursday outside a meeting of the school’s board of directors, seeking to put pressure on the university to do more to redress historical wrongs. “Respect our vote! Respect our vote!” they called out. A student vote in April overwhelmingly called on Georgetown to create a fund to help descendants of…

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Members of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights October 31, 2012.

International Human Rights Bodies Provide a Case for Reparations

By Editors' Choice, Reparations

By Justin Hansford, ACLU — It is common for nations where mass atrocities have taken place to engage in the process of reparation and repair. This process happened in Germany after the Holocaust, South Africa after apartheid, and here in the United States, forty years after the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. As a result, international human rights bodies have sought to lend their expertise to the process, often by…

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