135 years ago today, European leaders sat around a horseshoe-shaped table to set the rules for Africa’s colonization. By Patrick Gathara, Al Jazeera — On the afternoon of Saturday, November 15, 1884, an international conference was opened by the chancellor of the newly-created German Empire at his official residence on Wilhelmstrasse, in Berlin. Sat around a horseshoe-shaped table in a room overlooking the garden with representatives from every European country,…
By Dr. Maulana Karenga — Part 1. The conversations and controversy surrounding the movie “Harriet” of Hollywood seems, at first sight, to be simply about Harriet Tubman, the liberator, the…
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…
By Michael McLean, HNN — There’s a fabled moment from the Battle of Fredericksburg, a gruesome Civil War battle that extinguished several thousand lives, when the commander of a rebel…
More than two centuries after it was designed to empower southern white voters, the system continues to do just that. By Wilfred Codrington III, The Atlantic — s a color-blind…
In 1870, Henrietta Wood Sued for Reparations—and Won. The $2,500 verdict, the largest ever of its kind, offers evidence of the generational impact such awards can have. By W. Caleb McDaniel, Smithsonian Magazine— On April 17, 1878, 12 white jurors entered a federal courtroom in Cincinnati to deliver the verdict in a now-forgotten lawsuit about American slavery. The plaintiff was Henrietta Wood, described by a reporter at the time as…
The law is sometimes characterized as a clear set of rules, but it isn’t always so straightforward. By Jamal Greene and Elora Mukherjee, Los Angeles Times — The Morgan children were in their pajamas, probably dreaming, when four men broke into their home before daylight, loaded them into the back of an open wagon and forcibly took them across Pennsylvania’s southern border. The year was 1837. “DREAMERS” attend a news…
By Allison Miller — History, as a discipline, has a race problem. White people dominate the study of history, as students and as those who earn PhDs. According to federal…
Some 500 enslaved people revolted in Louisiana but were largely ignored by history. Two centuries later, an ambitious re-enactment brings their uprising back to life. By Rick Rojas, The New…
By Dr. Maulana Karenga — This is a reminder, prelude and promise of a coming review on the movie “Harriet”. This is in joyful and grateful homage to our illustrious…
By Richard Brody, The New Yorker — A common failure of movies, especially historical ones, is that they don’t open their drama to intellectual context or to the inner lives…
To truly understand the debt this country owes to Black people is to be liberated from the bondage of miseducation that we’ve remained shackled to in the so-called land of…
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