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American History

Chi Oriji leads a group in dance during the Juneteenth MusicFest and Parade, recognizing the end of slavery in America in Philadelphia on June 23, 2018.

Activists Are Pushing to Make Juneteenth a National Holiday

By News & Current Affairs

Here’s the History Behind Their Fight. By Olivia B. Waxman, Times — When President Donald Trump announced last week that he would hold a campaign rally in Tulsa on June 19, the backlash was swift. The speech was to take place near the site of a 1921 race massacre, and June 19 is celebrated each year as Juneteenth, in honor of the day in 1865 when enslaved men and women in…

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A protester in Minneapolis on Thursday.

From the Black Panthers to Black Lives Matter, the ongoing fight to end police violence against black Americans

By Editors' Choice

By Peniel E. Joseph, The Washington Post — The police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the subsequent protests, which featured law enforcement tear-gassing demonstrators, highlight the urgent need to transform America’s criminal justice system. Floyd, 46, managed to outrun the coronavirus pandemic that has taken too many black lives, only to be ensnared by that quintessentially American and dangerously malignant virus of white supremacy. In a video capture eerily reminiscent…

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Rev. Joseph Lowery with Rosa Parks

Undaunted Resistance: Joseph Lowery and the Spirit of SCLC

By Editors' Choice

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…

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Enslaved Africans serving in Nieu Amsterdam

North America’s First Freed Black Settlement Right in our NYC Neighborhood

By Reparations

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…

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Lorraine Hansberry at an NAACP rally in New York City, 1959.

Lorraine Hansberry’s Radical Imagination

By Commentaries/Opinions

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…

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