Category: African American History

We present a uDiscover Music playlist celebrating Laurens Hammond’s fantastic invention, starring Jimmy Smith, Booker T and the MGs, Procol Harum and many more.   —  PAUL SEXTON, U DISCOVER MUSIC There was once a man who invented an automatic transmission system for cars, a type of 3-D glasses, a synchronous clock motor and infrared devices. […]

  —  GREG GARRISON, AL.COM On Jan. 4, 1964, Harold Franklin walked onto Auburn’s campus as the first Black student in school history, pursuing a master’s degree that he never received after his thesis was repeatedly rejected, as late as 1969. On Sunday, May 3, 2020 at Auburn’s spring commencement for the College for Liberal […]

  —  HERB BOYD, NEW YORK AMSTERDAM NEWS If nothing else, Isabel Wilkerson’s bestseller Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, has resurrected a longstanding debate among scholars about the relevance of the term, particularly when caste was defined by the sociologist Oliver Cromwell Cox. While Wilkerson only quotes Cox once, it was enough to arouse […]

  —  ACLU In the middle of the 2020 pandemic, America was shaken by the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and the protests that erupted in the aftermath. But the disturbing trends we see today in police violence are the same patterns we’ve seen over the last 100 years. Again and again, commissions […]

Tom Molineaux’s strange life story is every bit as fascinating as his career as a pugilist   —  Keith Duggan, The Irish Times Imagine the strangeness: an African-American moving through the Irish countryside in the late 1810s, the Famine more than 30 years in the country’s future and the villages teeming and overwhelmingly white and […]

They want to set the record straight on their fathers’ legacies and the ahistorical information   — Morgan Jerkins, ZORA It used to be that Kwanzaa events were held at nearly every Black church, theater, and event space around and you could plan on going any day of the week after Christmas to celebrate the Nguzo Saba. […]

On Dec. 26, 1908, Jack Johnson, with a 14th-round KO of Tommy Burns in Australia, became the first African American to win the world heavyweight boxing title.   —  UPI Staff, United Press International Dec. 26 (UPI) — On this date in history: In 1776, American forces under Gen. George Washington, having crossed the Delaware River […]

During its heyday, Indiana Avenue was the center of Black culture in Indianapolis. During the Jazz Era legends like Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Ella Fitzgerald played alongside locals like the Hampton Sisters and Wes Montgomery at the 30-plus clubs in the neighborhood. “The Avenue” was also home to the headquarters of Madam C. J. Walker’s […]