This 2009 documentary was produced by the Washington, DC Office of Cable Television to commemorate DC Emancipation Day. The film is a stirring account of African-American history from the colonial…

This moving and profound portrait serves as a fitting biographical tribute as well as a piercing, often painful recount of African American history from slavery and the Civil War to the Jim Crow era, the Civil Rights movement and beyond. By Syreeta McFadden, The Atlantic — One of my white teachers in high school insisted that Toni Morrison would be confusing to me as a reader. So I approached the…

By M. Andrew Holowchak — The two most significant issues that led to war between the North and South were, most scholars acknowledge, slavery and states’ rights. Northern states had…

After Republicans lost their first election in 1856, the nineteenth-century Nate Silvers were happy to declare the antislavery movement a radical, fringe idea. Four years later, Abraham Lincoln won on…

By Henry Lewis Gates, Jr., Times — During an interview with Chris Rock for my PBS series African American Lives 2, we traced the ancestry of several well-known African Americans. When…

By Wyatt Massey, Frederick News Post — The Rev. Dr. Ernest Campbell said no, James Forman could not speak at his church service the next day. Campbell was the senior pastor at Riverside Church, a predominantly white church on the west side of Manhattan. Forman, a black civil rights leader, wanted to read something to the congregation at the next day’s service on May 4, 1969, according to a history…

Biographer David Blight on Douglass’ lessons for us: “White supremacy does not die … it revives in new forms.” By Chauncey DeVega, Salon — Black History Month, which has…

By Ginger Gibson — WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren, who is running for the Democratic presidential nomination, supports the federal government issuing reparations to black Americans who were economically…

An estimated 380,000 people have been killed in South Sudan, where most of the weaponry in the civil war is small arms. The job of CAR is to find out…

His supporters hark back to an 1860s fantasy of white male dominance. But the Confederacy won’t win in the long run. By Rebecca Solnit, The Guardian — In the 158th year of the American civil war, also known as 2018, the Confederacy continues its recent resurgence. Its victims include black people, of course, but also immigrants, Jews, Muslims, Latinos, trans people, gay people and women who want to exercise jurisdiction over…

‘At first I didn’t want to,’ says the author of this magisterial biography of the great abolitionist, ‘it was so daunting’ By Martin Pengelly, The Guardian — David Blight arrives…

The Black Press USA is the Web site of the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA), an umbrella grouping of over 200 African-American newspapers spread across the USA. The NNPA has…