Stephanie Pogue’s Quiet Revolution in Color

Arthur Huff Fauset and the Republic of Black Memory

From Black Opals to Black Gods of the Metropolis, Fauset built a career around the radical act of taking Black speech, belief, and imagination seriously.

The Last Witness of Greenwood

Lessie Benningfield Randle survived the Tulsa Race Massacre as a child, then spent her final public years turning memory into testimony.

Jewel Prestage and the Making of a Discipline

The first Black woman to earn a Ph.D. in political science from an American university became far more than a milestone. She became a movement builder.

Sutton E. Griggs and the Secret Government of Black Imagination

Before the Harlem Renaissance, before Afrofuturism became a critical language, Griggs built a radical literary world beneath the surface of American democracy.

Before “Lifting as We Climb,” Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin Issued the Call

How a Boston suffragist, editor and organizer helped turn Black women’s local clubs into a national political infrastructure.

John Conyers and the Architecture of Persistence

Before reparations entered the mainstream and before “Medicare for All” became a rallying cry, a Detroit congressman had already placed both inside the official congressional r

Black vote dilution at an industrial scale

After Louisiana v. Callais, states are moving with new confidence to redraw Black political power out of the map — and testing whether Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act still ha

The Strange Afterlife of Sarah Farro’s True Love

Sarah Farro’s only known novel was praised, dismissed, exhibited at the World’s Fair, then lost to history. Its rediscovery widened the map of African American literature.

James Peck Was Beaten Bloody in Birmingham. That Was Not the Beginning

Before James Peck became the white face of Freedom Ride brutality, he had already been jailed as a pacifist, organized seamen and helped invent the direct-action grammar of the civ