The black codes effectively continued enslavement for African Americans by restricting their rights and exploiting their labor. By Nadra Kareem Nittle — When slavery ended in the United States, freedom still eluded African Americans who were contending with the repressive set of laws known as the black codes. Widely enacted throughout the South following the Civil War—a period called Reconstruction—these laws both limited the rights of Black people and exploited them as a…
88th Annual Meeting of the United States Conference of Mayors Resolution In Support of the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act (H.R 40/S. 1083) WHEREAS, Congress finds that four million Africans and their descendants were brought to this land and enslaved in the American colonies beginning in 1619, and slavery was an institution that was statutorily upheld by the federal government of the United States…
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…
By Sonia Pruitt (Chair of the National Black Police Association) — Yesterday morning, I received a text message from a friend, who is also in law enforcement. The text contained a link to a news story, and the lede read “William Barr Says Those Who Don’t Show More Respect to Cops May Not Get Police Protection.” The next text from my friend read, “How horrible is this….” After I read the story, I felt…
By Henry Louis Gates, Jr. — We’ve all heard the story of the “40 acres and a mule” promise to former slaves. It’s a staple of black history lessons, and it’s the name of Spike Lee’s film company. The promise was the first systematic attempt to provide a form of reparations to newly freed slaves, and it was astonishingly radical for its time, proto-socialist in its implications. In fact, such…
How the legacy of Jim Crow haunts Trump’s America By Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, The New Republic — This April, PBS aired a groundbreaking documentary series on the fate of Reconstruction—and therefore of Black America. Featuring more than 40 scholars (myself among them) and Black descendants of key figures in Reconstruction’s history, this copiously researched chronicle also doubles as a powerful and chilling window on to our own age of violent and resurgent white nationalism.
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…
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 Henry Lewis Gates, Jr., Times — During an interview with Chris Rock for my PBS series African American Lives 2, we traced the ancestry of several well-known African Americans. When I told Rock that his great-great-grandfather Julius Caesar Tingman had served in the U.S. Colored Troops during the Civil War — enrolling on March 7, 1865, a little more than a month after the Confederates evacuated from Charleston, S.C. —…
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…
During the 1870s, more than a half a million Black men voted for the first time in their lives. But this wave of progressive change did not last long. By Rebekah Barber and Billy Corriher, Facing South — One hundred and fifty years ago, a Congress dominated by “Radical Republicans” — mostly former abolitionists who represented Northern states — mandated that Southern states rewrite their constitutions, ratify the 14th amendment, and grant…
Recalling a time when the empowerment of the most oppressed in our society paved the way for other social struggles also gives weight to today’s slogan that all lives will matter only when Black lives matter By Adam Sanchez, Zinn Education Project — From the urban rebellions to the salute at the Olympics, commemorations of 1968 — a pivotal year of Black Power — have appeared in news headlines throughout this anniversary year. Yet…
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