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…
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…
Towards the Year of Marcus Mosiah Garvey. 2020 will mark the 100th Anniversary of the International Convention of the Negro People of the World, Convened in 1920 in New York by Marcus Mosiah Garvey, President General of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL). Marcus Garvey was the greatest mass-organizer Black people have ever produced and the architect of an economic, social and political blueprint designed to…
This essay is an adaptation of the fourth annual Philip Roth Lecture, delivered at the Newark Public Library on November 4, 2019. The lecture began with an appreciation of Roth’s merging of fiction and history. An admirer of great historical writing, Roth understood that, to be truly great, it had to grapple with what he called, in The Plot Against America, “the relentless unfolding of the unforeseen.” Flipped on its…
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,…
The idea of economic amends for past injustices and persistent disparities is getting renewed attention. Here are some formulas for achieving the aim. By Patricia Cohen, The New York Times…
Even as some enslaved men escaped North, the retreat by the Army of Northern Virginia would have been disastrous without the support of its camp servants. By Kevin M. Levin,…
By Rev. Irene Monroe, LA Progressive — A year before the Mayflower arrived in 1620, the first group of enslaved Africans depicted as “20 and odd Negroes” arrived sometime during…
Here’s what you need to know. By Jameelah Nasheed, Teen Vogue — For over 250 years, people of African descent were enslaved in the United States. Tricked and stolen from…
By Derrick Johnson, NAACP President and CEO — As I ventured to the southern border near Laredo, Texas, I could not help but think about the tragic shootings in El…
By Danyelle Solomon — 2019 marks the 400th anniversary of Africans sold into bondage arriving on Virginia’s shores. It has been 156 years since the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, 55 years since the end of Jim Crow, and 51 years since the civil rights movement. All of these moments in U.S. history represent crossroads—moments where the country made a choice or where people demanded that the words on the pages of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights became more than words; that policies and practices were equitably distributed among all people, not just a select few…
New York, July 30, 2019 — Dr. Ron Daniels, President of the Institute of the Black World (IBW) and Convener of the National African American Reparations Commission (NAARC), will deliver…
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