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History

Doris Miller was awarded for his heroism during the Pearl Harbor attack.

Doris Miller to become first black sailor to have a Navy aircraft carrier named in his honor

By News & Current Affairs

A black mess attendant was a Pearl Harbor hero. Now an aircraft carrier will have his name. By Kim Bellware, The Washington Post — It was just before 8 a.m. aboard the USS West Virginia, anchored in Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, when the first torpedo hit. Mess Attendant 2nd Class Doris Miller was deep into the day’s laundry when the blast sent one of his lieutenants racing to…

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Liverpool

Liverpool street sign plan to highlight city’s slavery links

By News & Current Affairs, Reparations

Liverpool could introduce plaques to give an “honest account” of places connected to the slave trade. By BBC News — Much of the city’s 18th Century wealth came from the trade involving British slavers transporting Africans across the Atlantic. Mayor Joe Anderson said paintings, street names and buildings in the city were “important parts of the historical record which should not be concealed”. He is calling for new signs to…

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Plaque depicting warrior and attendants (16th-17th century), Edo peoples, Benin kingdom, Nigeria.

Liberating the precolonial history of Africa

By Editors' Choice

The West focuses only on slavery, but the history of Africa is so much more than a footnote to European imperialism. By Toby Green / Edited by Sam Haselby, Aeon — To understand the complexity and significance of West African history, there is no better thing to do than to go to Freetown. Sierra Leone’s capital is sited in the lee of the ‘lion-shaped’ mountain that gives the country its…

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‘Unfortunately for us, there is no William Monroe Trotter in 2020. Nor is there a Boston Guardian demanding that the black press “hold a mirror up to nature”.’

The radical black newspaper that declared ‘none are free unless all are free’

By Editors' Choice

In 1901, William Trotter founded an other Guardian – the Boston Guardian – to ‘hold a mirror up to nature’. We could use something similar today, writes Kerri Greenidge. By Kerri Greenidge — In 1901, William Monroe Trotter founded the Guardian newspaper in Boston. At that time, the more famous Guardian – the one you’re now reading – was published in Manchester, and Trotter had never traveled further than Chillicothe, Ohio.…

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“Colfax Massacre” in Louisiana.

‘The War of Races’: How a hateful ideology echoes through American history

By Editors' Choice

From slavery to Reconstruction to Dylann Roof, the idea of “race war” has a long and bloody legacy in the United States. By Michael E. Miller, The Washington Post — It was high noon on Easter 1873 when the white mob came riding into Colfax. Five months earlier, Louisiana had held its second election since the end of the Civil War and the beginning of black male suffrage. But some…

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Sydney Labat, 24, and 14 of her Tulane University classmates posed at the Whitney Plantation in Wallace, La.

Med students send message with plantation photo: We are our ancestors’ wildest dreams

By Editors' Choice

More than a dozen medical students from Tulane University posed at the former slave quarters in the hopes of inspiring others. By Mohammed Syed and Suzanne Ciechalski — It wasn’t by chance that more than a dozen black medical students dressed in white coats and posed outside the slave quarters of a Louisiana plantation. Russell Ledet and classmates from Tulane University planned the trip and photos at the Whitney Plantation…

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