African American History -

Virginians push to remember historically black high schools | The Washington Post

January 22, 2020January 22, 2020African American Education, African American History ...

NORFOLK, Va. — Vivian Monroe-Hester’s high school textbooks harbored hatred in their margins. [mc4wp_form id=”6042″] As a teenager at the all-black Booker T. Washington High School in segregated, 1960s-era Virginia, Monroe-Hester studied from used books passed along by white high schools. White students, knowing the texts’ final destination, scrawled their animus atop pictures, beneath paragraphs, […]

Remembering the 1968 Orangeburg Massacre When Police Shot Dead Three Unarmed Black Students | Democracy Now

January 21, 2020January 21, 2020African American History, Racism

The 1968 Orangeburg massacre is one of the most violent and least remembered events of the civil rights movement. [mc4wp_form id=”6042″] A crowd of students gathered on the campus of South Carolina State University to protest segregation at Orangeburg’s only bowling alley. After days of escalating tensions, students started a bonfire and held a vigil […]

Op-Ed: California’s forgotten slave history | Los Angeles Times

January 21, 2020African American History, Black History

Separated by just 60 miles along the I-10, Los Angeles and San Bernardino feel worlds apart. [mc4wp_form id=”6042″] The former boasts some of the richest urban developments and residential pockets in the nation. The latter — a “broken city,” as this newspaper put it in 2015 — struggled through five years of bankruptcy and municipal […]

Ella Baker’s Legacy Runs Deep. Know Her Name. | The New York Times

January 21, 2020January 27, 2020African American Activist, African American History

Her fighting spirit lives on in today’s social movements. [mc4wp_form id=”6042″] When the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo in 1964, he observed that anytime an award is given to “the dedicated pilots of our struggle who have sat at the controls as the freedom movement soared into […]

When Minneapolis Segregated | City Lab

January 16, 2020January 16, 2020African American History, Race Relations

In the early 1900s, racial housing covenants in the Minnesota city blocked home sales to minorities, establishing patterns of inequality that persist today. [mc4wp_form id=”6042″] Before it was torn apart by freeway construction in the middle of the 20th century, the Near North neighborhood in Minneapolis was home to the city’s largest concentration of African […]

Christian Soldiers | Slate

January 13, 2020January 13, 2020African American History, Lynchings ...

The lynching and torture of blacks in the Jim Crow South weren’t just acts of racism. They were religious rituals. [mc4wp_form id=”6042″] The cliché is that Americans have a short memory, but since Saturday, a number of us have been arguing over medieval religious wars and whether they have any lessons for today’s violence in […]

Born Into Slavery, This Centenarian Learned to Read at 116, Becoming the Nation’s Oldest Student | Black Enterprise

January 13, 2020June 19, 2020African American History, Black History

Selena Hill, Black Enterprise Despite being born into slavery and enduring over a century of discrimination, Mary Hardway Walker managed to accomplish an extraordinary feat. At 116 years old, she learned to read. Walker was born in Union Springs, Alabama, in 1848 and lived in bondage until she was freed at the age of 15 following […]

Does the United States Owe Reparations to the Descendants of Enslaved People? | The New York Times

January 8, 2020January 8, 2020African American History, Reparations

The idea of economic amends for past injustices and persistent disparities is getting renewed attention. What do you think should happen? [mc4wp_form id=”6042″] In 1988, President Ronald Reagan sought to “right a grave wrong” by signing legislation that apologized for the government’s forced relocation of 120,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II and established a $1.25 […]

America Has Tried Reparations Before. Here Is How It Went. | The New York Times

January 7, 2020January 7, 2020African American History, Black History ...

With a renewed focus on reparations for slavery, what lessons can be drawn from payments to victims of other historical injustices in America? [mc4wp_form id=”6042″] Ever since a Union Army general announced in Galveston, Tex., that “all slaves are free” on June 19, 1865 — a day now commemorated as Juneteenth — the question of […]

When Portland banned blacks: Oregon’s shameful history as an ‘all-white’ state | The Washington Post

January 7, 2020January 7, 2020African American History, Black History

In 1844, all black people were ordered to get out of Oregon Country, the expansive territory under American rule that stretched from the Pacific coast to the Rocky Mountains. [mc4wp_form id=”6042″] reside online and are fully searchable Those who refused to leave could be severely whipped, the provisional government law declared, by “not less than […]