Players from first all-Black All-American women’s basketball team reflect on making history in 1984

The 10 team members marveled over its meaning, then and now By Branson Wright, ANDSCAPEPhoto, USC All-American Cheryl Miller with USC flag team in 1984. Tony Duffy/Getty Images 1984 was packed with many firsts in women’s basketball. It was a year with a glimpse into the future of the game’s evolution, a year filled with […]

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The Oakland Tribune’s First Black Photojournalist Captured the ‘Black Aesthetic’ of the ’60s and ’70s

By Ariana Proehl, KQEDPhoto, Woman in downtown San Francisco on Market Street. (Kenneth P. Green Sr.) You know that curiosity that pops up sometimes when you’re in a gallery and you’re looking at a really good photo of a stranger? And the spirit of it, the everyday-ness of it, makes you want to know the person’s story? Were […]

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How New Yorker Howard Bennet fought to make Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a national holiday

By Andrew Berman, Village PreservationPhoto, Martin Luther King Jr. at the 1963 Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C. via Wiki Commons Fifty years ago, on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was shot as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. This ended the life of one of the 20th century’s […]

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FREDERICK DOUGLASS“What To The Slave, Is TheFourth of July”

On July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass was invited to address the citizens of his hometown, Rochester, New York. Whatever the expectations of his audience on that 76th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Douglass used the occasion not to celebrate the nation’s triumphs but to remind all of its continuing enslavement of millions of people. Douglass’s speech appears below.

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