Departments

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African American history

  • SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
    3/30/2023

    DeSantis's War on "Woke" Evokes Darkest Parts of Florida's History

    by Carol Anderson

    Calling DeSantis's agenda a "culture war" obscures the fact that is in fact a war against the marginalized, an effort to narrow the definition of who counts as a Floridian and whom the state will serve and protect, with the right to vote at the center. 

  • SOURCE: The Guardian
    3/30/2023

    Gullah Geechee of Sea Islands Fight for their Post-Slavery Legacy

    by DeNeen L Brown

    The Gullah Geechee people were chosen for enslavement in the Sea Islands because of their experience cultivating rice in Africa, and maintained a distinctive culture with strong African elements through slavery and emancipation. Development and gentrification threaten that legacy today. 

  • SOURCE: New York Review of Books
    3/28/2023

    The Jim Crow Reign of Terror

    by Eric Foner

    While the scope and horror of lynching has recently become acknowleged and memorialized, there is a parallel and more pervasive history, which Margaret Burhnam investigates, of racist terror carried out under color of law. 

  • SOURCE: Inquest
    3/23/2023

    Martin Sostre's Vision of Collective Liberation

    by Garrett Felber

    Martin Sostre's refusal to allow the New York prison system to subject him to invasive and violating searches showed how he placed bodily autonomy at the center of a radical critique of racial oppression. At what would be his 100th birthday, his legacy is considered. 

  • SOURCE: NPR
    3/22/2023

    The Women of the Montgomery Bus Boycott

    "It felt like Harriet Tubman's hands were pushing me down on one shoulder and Sojourner Truth's hand on me pushed me down on another one. History had me glued to the seat." – Claudette Colvin

  • SOURCE: The New Yorker
    3/6/2023

    Exhibiting the Black Panthers' Ephemera

    An exhibition of the radical group's posters illustrates the importance-and difficulty-of documenting political movements that used visual communications through ephemeral media like postering and newspapers. 

  • SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
    3/8/2023

    In Chicago, the Political Vibes Echo 1983, but the Politics are Different

    by Gordon Mantler

    Harold Washington's victory in 1983 to become the city's first Black mayor promised a new multicultural coalition politics. Forty years later, that coalition is discouraged and demobilized, and seems unlikely to challenge the entrenched interests that Washington tried to dislodge from power. 

  • SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
    3/6/2023

    The NBA Embraced Blackness in the 1970s—Moral Panic Ensued

    Theresa Runstedtler looks at the NBA's key transitional decade as a time when Black players didn't simply change the style of play but demanded fair treatment for the value created by their skilled labor, following the ethos of civil rights and Black Power. 

  • SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
    2/24/2023

    A Different Kind of Unfree Labor Haunts a Houston Suburb

    by Ashanté Reese

    Texas's convict labor system was a first step in reasserting white dominance over Black labor through criminal law. The discovery of remains of convicted laborers on the site of a former prison farm show the need to reckon with unfree labor after the end of slavery.