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A mob of white men posing in front of the office of the black-owned Daily Record newspaper after burning it down, Wilmington, North Carolina, November 10, 1898

An American Pogrom: The 1898 massacre of Black voters in Wilmington, North Carolina

By Editors' Choice

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…

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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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In Wilkerson’s view, racism is only the visible manifestation of something deeper, a hidden system of social domination.

Isabel Wilkerson’s World-Historical Theory of Race and Caste

By Editors' Choice

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…

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Demonstrators protesting the death of George Floyd hold up placards up near the White House on May 31, 2020 in Washington, DC. - Thousands of National Guard troops patrolled major US cities after five consecutive nights of protests over racism and police brutality that boiled over into arson and looting, sending shock waves through the country. The death Monday of an unarmed black man, George Floyd, at the hands of police in Minneapolis ignited this latest wave of outrage in the US over law enforcement's repeated use of lethal force against African Americans -- this one like others before captured on cellphone video.

Robin DiAngelo: How ‘white fragility’ supports racism and how whites can stop it

By Editors' Choice

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…

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Bakari Sellers' new memoir, "My Vanishing Country," traces his life from growing up in rural Denmark, South Carolina, to his career in electoral politics and as a political analyst.

Bakari Sellers on a life shaped by the rural South’s civil rights movement

By Editors' Choice

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…

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Ta-Nehisi Coates

An Ongoing Battle. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s narratives of freedom.

By Editors' Choice

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…

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The Freedman. Artist: John Quincy Adams Ward. 1863

The Sexual Assault and Exploitation of Enslaved Men in America

By Reparations

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…

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Dr. Lonnie Bunch III and Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr.

Dr. Lonnie Bunch’s African American Museum Dream Fulfilled

By News & Current Affairs

Smithsonian Secretary Goes One-on-One with NNPA President about New Book By Stacy M. Brown, NNPA — Dr. Lonnie Bunch III, the 14th Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, sat down for an exclusive interview with National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA) President and CEO Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr., at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. The two discussed Bunch’s timely new book, “A Fool’s Errand: Creating the…

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