
By Elizabeth Kim, The Gothamist — In 1958, Lenox Terrace vaulted itself into the rarified standing of being the first luxury apartment complex in Harlem. Built on three blocks as…
By Elizabeth Kim, The Gothamist — In 1958, Lenox Terrace vaulted itself into the rarified standing of being the first luxury apartment complex in Harlem. Built on three blocks as…
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…
Aesthetically, the antebellum plantations of the Old South are undeniably beautiful. But they’re built on human degradation. By Patricia J. Williams, The Nation — It was not a kind thought…
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…
The real Young prodigy’s travel to Alabama on a civil rights journey and go back in time to tackle the issue of reparations. Fast paced, historical, but EPIC. A must…
By Mark Muro and Jacob Whiton, Brookings — We’ve been harping for a while on the stark economic divides that define American life in the Donald Trump years. To be sure, racial and cultural resentment have…
By Roy E. Finkenbine — In an interview conducted in 2002, the late Helen Hornbeck Tanner, an influential historian of the Native American experience in the Midwest best known for…
Sixty-five years after Brown v. Board of Education, U.S. schools remain largely segregated. This matters not only because white and black students experience very different educational outcomes, but also because school…
“The Water Dancer” comes out of a powerful examination of the legacies of slavery today. By Eric Herschthal, The New Republic — Eight years ago, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote an essay in The…
“This will get worse before it gets better.” By Tess Owen, Vice — It used to be much easier to spot a budding Nazi in the classroom, or at least…
The traumas visited upon Black bodies for the past 400 years have included physical violence and theft of spirituality, which is linked to today’s mental and spiritual wounds, passed down…
From the beginning, some Americans have been able to move more freely than others. By Ben Fountain, Medium — They were called patrollers or, variously, “paterollers,” “paddyrollers,” or “patterolls,” and they were meant to be part of the solution to Colonial America’s biggest problem, labor. Unlike Great Britain, which had a large, basically immobile peasant class that could be forced to work for subsistence wages, there weren’t enough cheap bodies…