
By M. Andrew Holowchak — The two most significant issues that led to war between the North and South were, most scholars acknowledge, slavery and states’ rights. Northern states had…
By M. Andrew Holowchak — The two most significant issues that led to war between the North and South were, most scholars acknowledge, slavery and states’ rights. Northern states had…
By Nicholas Guyatt — Were the Founding Fathers responsible for American slavery? William Lloyd Garrison, the celebrated abolitionist, certainly thought so. In an uncompromising address in Framingham, Massachusetts, on July 4, 1854, Garrison denounced the hypocrisy of a nation that declared that “all men are created equal” while holding nearly four million African-Americans in bondage. The US Constitution was hopelessly implicated in this terrible crime, Garrison claimed: it kept free…
By Howard W. French, NYR — There is a broad strain in Western thought that has long treated Africa as existing outside of history and progress; it ranges from some of our most famous thinkers to the entertainment that generations of children have grown up with. There are Disney cartoons that depict barely clothed African cannibals merrily stewing their victims in giant pots suspended above pit fires.1 Among intellectuals there is…
HR 40 is about more than money. It’s about grappling with history. By The Christian Century — In a widely discussed 2014 essay in the Atlantic titled “The Case for Reparations,”…
But the persistence of racially biased policing means that unless American policing reckons with its racist roots, it is likely to keep repeating mistakes of the past. Connie Hassett-Walker, The Conversation — Outrage over racial profiling and the killing of African Americans by police officers and vigilantes in recent years helped give rise to the Black Lives Matter movement. But tensions between the police and black communities are nothing new. There are many precedents to the Ferguson,…
By Earl Ofari Hutchinson — Thursday June 6, 2019, marks the 75 anniversary of the Normandie invasion. The invasion along with Stalingrad, the battle of Moscow, the brutal struggles in…
Rock Newman Show — With reparations, gentrification, issues like the Mueller Report and rising calls for president Trump’s impeachment making headlines. We’ll share an illuminating discussion of the “Politics of the Unusual” with political scientist Dr. Ron Daniels, president of “The Institute of the Black World 21st Century”. Comments: Share your thoughts or read comments made by others about this episode of the Rock Newman Show on the Rock Newman…
Main port on the island of Goree a major point of embarkation during the slave trade. By John Torpey, Forbes — The issue of reparations for African-Americans is back in…
By Robert Greene II, The Nation — Gone was the optimism of 1963. It had been replaced by a sense of disillusionment, a sense of urgency that America was about to lose the last chance to have its soul.” This was how Jet magazine described the climax of the Poor People’s Campaign, which reached Washington, DC, in the tumultuous summer of 1968. For Jet and for many early civil-rights activists, the Poor People’s Campaign…
By Susannah Hutcheson, USA Today — Our series “How I became a …” digs into the stories of accomplished and influential people, finding out how they got to where they are in their careers. As the director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., Lonnie Bunch spends his days helping Americans understand history that has both brought us together and divided us. The founding…
By Lisa Vernon Sparks, Daily Press — HAMPTON, Va. (AP) — A trove of historical records tells us Fort Monroe in Hampton was built on the backs of thousands of African slaves. But little was known about their identities or who they were — until now. Meet Amos Henley, 23. Skilled, but unpaid for his efforts, Henley was among hundreds leased out by slave owners to the Army — and…
Ana Lucia Araujo is a historian and professor at Howard University. Her latest book Reparations for Slavery and the Atlantic Slave Trade: A Transnational and Comparative History was published in…