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SNCC protesters march in Montgomery, 1965

Documenting and Digitizing Democracy: The SNCC Digital Gateway

By Editors' Choice

By Ashley Farmer, Black Perspectives — “Learn from the Past, Organize the Future, Make Democracy Work.” This is the mission statement that greets visitors at the SNCC Digital Gateway—a wide-ranging, collaborative website that documents and animates the history of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Founded in April 1960 under the guidance of veteran activist Ella Baker, SNCC became a leading civil rights organization due to countless young organizers who engaged in voter…

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‘Freeing a Slave from the Slave Stick Jamaica’ circa 1876. From the International Mission

How slaveholders in the Caribbean maintained control

By Reparations

By Christer Petley, Edited by Nigel Warburton, Aeona — It is no surprise that the whip is synonymous with New World slavery: its continual crack remained an audible threat to enslaved workers to keep at their work, reminding them that their lives and bodies were not their own, and that they should maintain (outwardly at least) a demeanour of dutiful subordination to their overlords. The whip was a cruel and effective instrument…

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John A. Madison, great-grandson of Dred Scott, points to his ancestor's unmarked grave.

The Real Origins of Birthright Citizenship

By News & Current Affairs

Its purpose 150 years ago was to incorporate former slaves into the nation. By Martha S. Jones, The Atlantic — Birthright citizenship just might be, former slaves believed, the safeguard they needed. In the decades before the Civil War, in an era when a remedy like the Fourteenth Amendment was hard to imagine, free black Americans embraced the view that they were citizens by virtue of having been born on…

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The Imperial Prison Farm Cemetery has 31 marked graves of inmates and guards dating 1912-1943.

A Fate Worse Than Slavery, Unearthed in Sugar Land

By Reparations

Bodies of sugar cane workers recently discovered in Texas reveal gruesome details about the convict leasing system. By Brent Staples, The New York Times — The blood-drenched history that gave the city of Sugar Land, Tex., its name showed its face earlier this year, when a school construction crew discovered the remains of 95 African-Americans whose unmarked graves date back more than a century. The dead — some of whom may have…

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Megyn Kelly and Jim Crow, a character worn in blackface used to mock African-Americans.

Megyn Kelly defended blackface on the ‘Today’ show, but here’s the racist history behind it

By News & Current Affairs

By Jacob Shamsian, Insider — “Today” host Megyn Kelly apologized Wednesday for defending blackface, the act of non-black people wearing makeup to make themselves look black. Blackface has a racist history in the United States. It was used in minstrel shows, movies, and other forms of entertainment to dehumanize African-Americans and exclude them from the entertainment industry. Mocking caricatures spread stereotypes about African-Americans that were used to deny them civil…

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James Forten

This Black Activist Was One of the Richest Men in Early America

By Editors' Choice

A Black sailmaker was helping to lead the anti-slavery movement long before it was popular in America. By Sean Braswell, OZY — In the spring of 1842, several thousand Philadelphians poured into the streets for one of the largest funerals in the city’s history. It was a remarkable sight: An interracial procession that included everyone from poor Black laborers to wealthy White merchants to sea captains and shippers. On that…

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Denmark Vesey House at 56 Bull Street in Charleston, South Carolina.

Slavery and Memory in Charleston, South Carolina

By Reparations

By Ashleigh Lawrence-Sanders, AAIHS — The familiar refrain after the Emmanuel AME massacre on June 17, 2015, was that Dylann Roof, the murderer, was not from “here.” But as Ethan Kytle and Blain Roberts’ Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy aptly demonstrates, Roof’s understanding of history and memory in Charleston led him to that church; and his understanding was not alien to the sometimes violently, oft-contested memory of slavery in the…

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19th Century illustration of British massacres in India

An empire bathed in blood: when Britannia ruled the waves

By Reparations

In a desperate bid to head off a Scottish Yes vote, David Cameron evoked a mythical British Empire that had given democracy to the poor and freedom to the slaves. Here Ken Olende looks back at what life was really like when Britannia ruled the waves. By The Socialist Worker — The British Empire was the largest ever known. It covered a quarter of the world’s land mass and ruled…

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