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American History

Donald Yacovone

How Textbooks Taught White Supremacy

By Commentaries/Opinions

A historian steps back to the 1700s and shares what’s changed and what needs to change. By Liz Mineo, The Harvard Gazaette — Historian Donald Yacovone, an associate at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research and a 2013 winner of the W.E.B. Du Bois medal, was researching a book on the legacy of the antislavery movement when he came across some old history school textbooks that stopped him cold —…

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Theodore Roosevelt was one of many U.S. presidents who was racist.

Presidents have a long history of condescension, indifference and outright racism towards Black Americans

By Editors' Choice

President Woodrow Wilson told Black leaders, ‘Segregation is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen.’ He was one in a long line of racist American presidents. By Stephen A. Jones and Eric Freedman — The fury over racial injustice that erupted in the wake of George Floyd’s killing has forced Americans to confront their history. That’s unfamiliar territory for most Americans, whose…

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The Red, Black and Green Universal African Flag

The Red, Black & Green: Fly the Flag and Fight for the Exoneration of Marcus Garvey

By Vantage Point Articles

Vantage Point Articles & Essays By Dr. Ron Daniels (Originally Published July 2015) — August 17 will mark the 128th birthday of the Honorable Marcus Mosiah Garvey, the visionary Jamaican-born leader who built the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL) into the largest mass movement for liberation in the history of Africans in America and perhaps the world!…

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The Georgian mansion and adjacent slave quarters were once part of a 500-acre farm just north of Boston.

Royall House and Slave Quarters

By Reparations

Preserving black history as “an act of liberation” By Nell Porter Brown, Harvard Magazine — Isaac Royall Sr. built a fortune on his Antigua sugar plantation and returned to Boston in 1737 to settle into an opulent Georgian mansion in what’s now Medford, Massachusetts. To operate the surrounding 500-acre farm, enormous by colonial-era standards, he also shipped north across the ocean “a parcel of negroes.” Those 27 enslaved people were plucked…

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John R. Lewis, a civil rights titan and a formidable member of Congress for three decades, died at the age of 80 on July 17.

John Lewis, front-line civil rights leader and eminence of Capitol Hill, dies at 80

By News & Current Affairs

By Laurence I. Barrett, The Washington Post — John Lewis, a civil rights leader who preached nonviolence while enduring beatings and jailings during seminal front-line confrontations of the 1960s and later spent more than three decades in Congress defending the crucial gains he had helped achieve for people of color, has died. He was 80. His death was announced in statements from his family and from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi…

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A print of U.S. President Andrew Jackson at the Battle of Tallushatchee, 1813.

This Land Is Not Your Land

By Editors' Choice

The Ethnic Cleansing of Native Americans By David Treuer — In his first annual message to the U.S. Congress, in 1829, U.S. President Andrew Jackson—a slave-owning real estate speculator already famous for burning down Creek settlements and hounding the survivors of the Creek War of 1813–14—called for the “voluntary” migration of Native Americans to lands west of the Mississippi River. Six months later, in the spring of 1830, he signed…

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Five generations of a slave family.

American slavery: Separating fact from myth

By Reparations

By Daina Ramey Berry — People think they know everything about slavery in the United States, but they don’t. They think the majority of African slaves came to the American colonies, but they didn’t. They talk about 400 years of slavery, but it wasn’t. They claim all Southerners owned slaves, but they didn’t. Some argue it was all a long time ago, but it wasn’t. Slavery has been in the…

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