Dr. Julianne Malveaux — Exactly one hundred and thirty-six years to the day after Ida B. Wells was thrown off a Chesapeake and Ohio railroad train, she was awarded a…
By Equal Justice Initiative — The Pulitzer Prizes announced on Monday, May 4, 2020 that a special citation has been awarded to anti-lynching crusader and pioneering journalist Ida B. Wells “[f]or…
TULSA, Okla. — The Black Wall Street Memorial committee and Tulsa Community Remembrance Coalition are launching the “10,000 Brick Campaign” throughout May to build a memorial to Black Wall Street in honor of…
By R. Drew Smith, AAIHS — Against all odds, a movement for racial justice took hold in mid-20th-century America, emerging from within the racially-heated South, and drawing sustenance from a rich-array of Black religious sources. A cadre of activist Black clergypersons were among the central figures in this historic social movement, with organizations such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) epitomizing the promise of a socially-mobilized Black clergy sector. Although SCLC…
By Sarah Bean Apmann, GVSHP — According to historian Christopher Moore, the first legally emancipated community of people of African descent in North America was found in Lower Manhattan, comprising much of present-day Greenwich Village and the South Village, and parts of the Lower East Side and East Village. This settlement was comprised of individual landholdings, many of which belonged to former “company slaves” of the Dutch West India Company. These former slaves, both men…
For the playwright and activist, neither liberal reform nor countercultural art were enough. The very foundations of American democracy needed to be transformed. By Elias Rodriques, The Nation — In October of 1964, three months after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, Lorraine Hansberry’s play The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window opened on Broadway. At the time, Hansberry was already famous for A Raisin in the Sun, but the intervening years had…
By Tyler Parry, AAIHS — In November 1864, a formerly enslaved man named Peter Bumper and his fiance Bucinda Nelson had their marriage registered with the federal government. Long denied access…
But in 1862, the federal government doled out the 2020 equivalent of $23 million – NOT to the formerly enslaved but to their white enslavers. By Kali Holloway, The Nation — In 1870 a black woman named Henrietta Wood sued the white deputy sheriff who, nearly two decades earlier, kidnapped her from the free state of Ohio, illegally transported her to slaveholding Kentucky, and sold her into a life of enslavement that…
On the 400th anniversary of the ship’s landing in Plymouth, Massachusetts, the commemoration will be more inclusive than in the past. By Tanya Mohn, NYT — This article is part of our latest Museums special section, which focuses on the intersection of art and politics. Paula Peters remembers the last major anniversary of the historic voyage in 1620 of the Mayflower from Plymouth, England, to Plymouth, Mass. It was in 1970….
By Dr. Julianne Malveaux — Few in these United States had heard of Katherine Johnson, the gifted mathematician who finished high school and college at 18. How could we know…
By Donne Levy, AlterNet — America is a deeply divided nation. That fact may be the only thing that Americans of all racial, ethnic, and political groups can agree about. A Washington…
February 29, 2020, Atlanta, GA — Dr. Ron Daniels will be in Atlanta for a signing of his new book “Still on This Journey: The Vision and Mission of Dr. Ron Daniels” and a conversation on Reparations, Gentrification, the Presidential Election, 2020 The Year of Marcus Mosiah Garvey and State of the Black World Conference V.