New books investigate the brutality of the internal slave trade by focusing on a single firm, Franklin and Armfield, and examine the role of white women in enslaving Black people….
Eric Williams and the tangled history of capitalism and slavery. By Gerald Horne, The Nation — Before he became a celebrated author and the founding father and first prime minister…
A new book tells the forgotten story of fugitive slaves who found freedom south of the border. David S. Reynolds, The New York Review There has long been a fascination…
Uncovering the truth about the 1898 massacre of black voters in Wilmington, North Carolina. By David W. Blight — Political violence, especially around elections, has a long history in the United States. In the antebellum era, white nativist Protestants often rioted against Catholic immigrants because of the perceived threat of Irish voters and their “popery.” In the New York City draft riots of 1863, white mobs murdered African-Americans over conscription…
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 —…
By comparing white supremacy in the U.S. to the caste system in India, her new book at once illuminates and collapses a complex history. By Sunil Khilnani, The New Yorker — As the summer of 1958 was coming to an end, Martin Luther King, Jr., was newly famous and exhausted. All of twenty-nine years old, he had been travelling across the country for weeks promoting his first book, “Stride Toward…
By Brandy Monk-Payton, Public Books — I. CHANNELING FREEDOM DREAMS A Black boy presses his forehead and cheek against the television. He shuts his eyes, clasps his hands together, and…
The author of one of the best selling books on racism, Robin DiAngelo tells us about how “white fragility” contributes to racism, and how white people can stop it. By Sandee LaMotte, CNN — If you’re a white person in America, social justice educator Robin DiAngelo has a message for you: You’re a racist, pure and simple, and without a lifetime of conscious effort you always will be. You just…
By Olivia Paschal, Facing South — Born in 1984, former South Carolina state Rep. Bakari Sellers was raised in rural Denmark, South Carolina, to a family deeply involved in the civil rights movement. His father, educator Cleveland Sellers, was an activist with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee who was incarcerated on specious charges for which he was later pardoned following the Orangeburg Massacre at South Carolina State University in 1968. State troopers shot…
History has always been a weapon in the hands of Ta-Nehisi Coates. Now, in his debut novel, the social critic and essayist sets out to recover those struggles for emancipation that have been lost to the past. By Elias Rodriques, The Nation — American history has always been a weapon in the hands of Ta-Nehisi Coates. As a blogger and columnist for The Atlantic, he wielded it to chronicle the long…
Two new books tell the stories of people kidnapped and sold into slavery. One of them sued successfully. By Eric Herschthal, The New Republic — When we think about slavery,…
By Thomas A. Foster, History News Network — Editor’s note: This is an excerpt from Rethinking Rufus: Sexual Violations of Enslaved Men by Thomas A. Foster. Reprinted with permission from The University of Georgia Press. The promise of freedom may also have been used to entice enslaved men into sexual contact with white women. In eighteenth-century Pennsylvania, one court record of punishment meted out to a white woman and an enslaved man for…