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Students at Concord Middle School study the abolitionist movement from a local perspective with artifacts provided by the Concord Museum.

Americans show spotty knowledge about the history of slavery but acknowledge its enduring effects

By News & Current Affairs, Reparations

By Emily Guskin, Scott Clement and Joe Heim, The Washington Post — Americans have spotty knowledge of central facts about the history of slavery in the United States, although younger adults have an edge over their elders, according to a Washington Post-SSRS poll. Even so, a solid majority say the legacy of slavery affects American society today, including majorities across racial, partisan and generational lines. The Post-SSRS poll quizzed a random…

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October 22, 2019
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A slave auction in the South is depicted in a sketch circa 1861 by Theodore R. Davis.

It was the nation’s largest auction of enslaved people.

By Reparations

Now, a search for descendants of the ‘weeping time.’ Historians Henry Louis Gates Jr. and James Swanson are writing a new account of the notorious 1859 auction of 429 slaves and searching for descendants. By Michael E. Ruane, The Washington Post — It poured rain at the Georgia racetrack that Wednesday and Thursday, and the wind blew water into the covered grandstand where the merchandise was gathered for auction. Many…

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October 18, 2019
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The Freedman. Artist: John Quincy Adams Ward. 1863

The Sexual Assault and Exploitation of Enslaved Men in America

By Reparations

By Thomas A. Foster, History News Network — Editor’s note: This is an excerpt from Rethinking Rufus: Sexual Violations of Enslaved Men by Thomas A. Foster. Reprinted with permission from The University of Georgia Press. The promise of freedom may also have been used to entice enslaved men into sexual contact with white women. In eighteenth-century Pennsylvania, one court record of punishment meted out to a white woman and an enslaved man for…

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October 8, 2019
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The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History

400 years later, America still has so much to learn about its racial history

By Editors' Choice

By Lonnie Bunch, The Washington Post — In his influential treatise on race, “The Fire Next Time,” James Baldwin wrote, “To accept one’s past — one’s history — is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.” Baldwin’s words…

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October 8, 2019
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