George Washington privately condemned slavery while actively holding hundreds of people in enslavement. He championed gradual emancipation plans while scheming to keep the people he enslaved from accessing them. He ruthlessly...
One hundred years ago, Dr. Carter G. Woodson created and launched the inaugural Negro History Week after his professors told him that Black people didn’t have a history worth studying. Negro History Week built on the success ...
Reed Peggram, born in Boston in 1914, a gay Black man in a world that put up barriers to his success, excelled at Harvard before heading to a Europe on the brink of war. In Europe he fell in love with a Danist artist, and des...
Charles C. Diggs, Jr., founder of the Congressional Black Caucus, spent 25 years in Congress, pushing for change, on issues from segregation in commercial aviation to home-rule for the residents of Washington, DC, to the anti...
Dr. Marguerite Phillips Dorsey Cartwright, born May 17, 1910, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was a journalist, sociologist, educator, and actress, who served as a correspondent for the United Nations, attended and wrote about b...
The feminist anti-rape movement began in the late 1960s at the height of women’s liberation. As rape crisis centers relied on federal grants aimed at prosecution of those committing sexual violence, feminists worried about th...
On the slave ships that sailed between Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, and the West Coast of Africa from the 16th through the 19th Centuries, the crews included not just white sailors but also Black mariners, including a significa...
My guest today is Dr. Martha S. Jones , the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor, professor of history, and a professor at the SNF Agora Institute at the Johns Hopkins University and author of The Trouble of Color: ...
The Universal Negro Improvement Association is often most closely associated with Marcus Garvey, but from the beginning, the work of women was essential to the development of the organization. Amy Ashwood co-founded the UNIA ...
After emancipation, formerly enslaved Black Americans knew that the key to economic freedom was land ownership, but as soon as they began to acquire land, local tax assessors began to overassess their land and exact steep pen...
For Ericka Huggins, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which she attended at just 15 years old, was a turning point in her life, inspiring her toward activism. She later joined the Black Panther Party, and after be...
In 1865, when Black people in Mississippi first gained the legal right to marriage, so-called Black Codes outlawed interracial marriage, punishable by life in prison. Five years later, Republicans in the Mississippi state leg...
In 1686, Susannah Mingo, Elizabeth Atkins, Dorothy Spendlove, and their children, all of whom were half-siblings, along with some of their children's other half-siblings and their children's father, boarded a ship headed from...
Henry Christophe, one of the heroes of the Haitian Revolution, was, from 1811 to his death in 1820, King Henry I of the Kingdom of Haiti, the first, last, and only King that Haiti ever had. This week we look at Christophe’s m...
On June 15, 1933, the all-white, all-male Chicago Symphony Orchestra performed Florence Price’s award-winning Symphony Number 1 in E minor, the first institution of its caliber to play the work of a Black woman composer. It w...
When she was just fifteen years old, in 1830, Sarah Martha Sanders was sold to Richard Walpole Cogdell of Charleston, South Carolina. Within a year she was pregnant with his child, and just after she turned 17, Sarah Martha g...
At the dedication for a school for African American students in Manassas, Virginia, in 1894, Frederick Douglass said: “no greater benefit can be bestowed upon a long benighted people, than giving to them, as we are here earne...
Between 1921 and 1948, every Southern and border state, except Delaware, set up scholarship programs to send Black students out of state for graduate study rather than admit them to historically white public colleges or build...
In 1946, the National Football League began the process of reintegration after a “gentleman’s agreement” had stopped teams from hiring Black players for over a decade. Even as the NFL began to re-integrate, though, racist ste...
In 1974, Republican governor Ronald Reagan appointed educator Dr. Claudia Hampton, a Democrat active in her local NAACP, as the first Black woman trustee to the board of California State University. For the next twenty years ...
In 1919, racial tensions in the US, exacerbated by changes brought about by the first wave of the Great Migration and by the return of Black soldiers who demanded equal citizenship from the country they’d fought for, boiled o...
As the Civil War was drawing to a close, President Lincoln was preparing for what came after, with plans for reunification of the country, and he began to advocate for limited suffrage for Black Americans. John Wilkes Booth’s...
Fictional depictions of Southern plantations often present romanticized visions of genteel country life, but for the people enslaved on plantations the reality was that of a forced labor camp. At the same time the plantation ...
Shortly after New Orleans became a US city (via the Louisiana Purchase), the municipal council established one of the country’s first professional salaried police forces and began operation of Police Jail, both efforts aimed ...
