In September 1970, commandos from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) hijacked five planes, landing three of them near Zarqua, Jordan, at a remote desert airstrip called Dawson’s Field, which the command…
Over 350,000 African American men joined the United States military during World War I, serving valiantly despite discrimination and slander. Historian and civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois had hoped that their patrioti…
During World War II, over 120,000 Japanese Americans, most of whom were US citizens, were forcibly removed from their homes in California, Washington, and Oregon, and imprisoned in relocation centers, small towns surrounded …
In September 1969, African American journalist Wallace Terry reported on “another war being fought in Vietnam — between black and white Americans.” After the 1948 integration of the military, the U.S. Army had tried to be co…
In the 1980s undocumented Irish immigrants convinced United States lawmakers to create a program that would provide a path to citizenship for individuals without family connections in the United States. That program eventual…
In 1963, on the heels of a failed desegregation campaign in Albany, Georgia, Martin Luther King., Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference decided to take a stand for Civil Rights in “the Most Segregated City in…
While voters were casting their ballots in the 1972 presidential election, Native demonstrators had taken over the Bureau of Indian Affairs building in Washington, DC, barricading themselves in with office furniture and prep…
In the decades following the Civil War, African Americans reliably voted for the Republican Party, which had led the efforts to outlaw slavery and enfranchise Black voters; and white southerners reliably voted for the Democr…
In 1983, Harold Washington took on the Chicago machine and won, with the help of a multiracial coalition, becoming the first Black mayor of Chicago. Winning the mayoral election was only the first fight, and 29 of the 50 ald…
On February 29, 1968, Lady Bird Johnson hosted the first–and last–White House Fashion Show. The fashion show, intended both to highlight the fourth largest industry in the United States and to promote domestic tourism, inadv…
In her 2015 book, Gloria Steinem described the National Women’s Conference of 1977 as “the most important event nobody knows about.” The four-day event in Houston, Texas, which brought together 2,000 delegates and another 15…
On the morning of July 24, 1915, employees of the Western Electric Company and their families excitedly boarded the SS Eastland near the Clark Street Bridge in Chicago, eager to set off for a day of fun in Michigan City, Ind…
If you’ve ever lived in Chicago, you’ve probably heard at some point that Chicago has the largest Polish population outside of Warsaw. While that’s an exaggeration it’s certainly the case that the Chicagoland region has a la…
When businessman John H. Johnson died in 2005, Ebony Magazine, the monthly photo-editorial magazine that he launched in 1945, reached an estimated 10 million readers. Under the direction of executive editor Lerone Bennet Jr.…
The first Cook County Jail was a wooden stockade, built in 1833 in Chicago, which was then a town of around 250 people. Today, the Cook County Department of Corrections, which takes up 8 city blocks on the Southwest Side of …
