
Thursday, February 20, 2020, 6:00 PM — On the eve of the 54th Commemoration of the Martyrdom of “Our Black Shining Prince” to celebrate the life and legacy of Malcolm…
Thursday, February 20, 2020, 6:00 PM — On the eve of the 54th Commemoration of the Martyrdom of “Our Black Shining Prince” to celebrate the life and legacy of Malcolm…
By Brian MacQuarrie, The Boston Globe — David Debias passed explosives to the thundering guns of the USS Constitution on the night of Feb. 20, 1815. He heard US Marines shooting from the masts, watched razor-sharp splinters gash his comrades, and basked in the Constitution’s resounding victory over two British warships in its final battle, 180 miles southwest of Gibraltar. Debias was from Beacon Hill. He was 8 years old….
By Andrew Joseph Pegoda — During Black History Month and beyond, Americans are generally taught to believe that contact between white and black Americans was gradually prohibited after Reconstruction through a combination of social and legal traditions. Under the regime of Jim Crow segregation, two supposedly “separate but equal” societies gradually emerged — one for white people, another for black people — and lasted until the ’50s and ’60s. The two societies in that infamous phrase were never equal…
Black women like Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, Ella Baker and Mary Church Terrell played a major role in the women’s suffrage movement. By Nsenga K. Burton — August 18, 2020 marks…
By Roy E. Finkenbine, HNN — The history of slavery in America is, to a great extent, the history of erasure. For most of the century and a half since…
By Dr. Maulana Karenga — As we contemplate various ways to celebrate Black History Month, we must ask ourselves how do we pay proper hommage to this sacred narrative we…
N.J.’s refusal to list the Camden home where MLK plotted his first protest on the state’s Register of Historic Places insults the civil rights leader’s legacy. By Linn Washington Jr., — A significant “first” usually merits the designation of historic. For example, the first formal protest against racial discrimination by civil rights icon Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in June 1950 — an action that produced King’s first lawsuit…
Black History Month lessons have been ‘stagnant’ for years, educators say. Here’s how some teachers are trying to change things. By Olivia B. Waxman, TIME — Freshman year can make…
Activists and preservationists are changing the kinds of places that are protected—and what it means to preserve them. By Casey Cep, The New Yorker — No one knows what happened to Gabriel’s body. Born into slavery the year his country declared its freedom, he trained as a plantation blacksmith and was hired out to foundries in Richmond, Virginia, where he befriended other enslaved people. Together, they absorbed, from the revolutionary…
By Rick Hellman, The University of Kansas — Playwright Darren Canady shocks audiences by opening his new two-act drama, “Reparations,” with a scene of a lynching. But he leavens that tragedy with later scenes of the love and dedication that sustained African Americans through centuries of trial, even offering an Afro-Futuristic vision of hope. Seattle’s Sound Theatre Company opened “Reparations” Jan. 8 at the city’s Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute. It…
Source CNN — The first monument in the United States honoring the victims of lynching has become a must-see civil rights attraction in Montgomery, Alabama, and now it’s been expanded. The Equal Justice Initiative opened its new Legacy Pavilion on Saturday — just in time to welcome visitors to the Alabama state capitol for the Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday weekend. The Legacy Pavilion features a new memorial recognizing more than…
From mass incarceration to mass deportation, our nation remains in deep denial. By Michelle Alexander, NYT — Ten years have passed since my book, “The New Jim Crow,” was published. I wrote it to challenge our nation to reckon with the recurring cycles of racial reform, retrenchment and rebirth of caste-like systems that have defined our racial history since slavery. It has been an astonishing decade. Everything and nothing has…