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Black History Episodes

Feb. 26, 2024

The Combahee River Raid of 1863

Starting in November 1861, the Union Army held the city of Beaufort, South Carolina, using the Sea Islands as a southern base of operations in the Civil War. Harriet Tubman joined the Army there, debriefing freedom seekers w…
Jan. 15, 2024

Clotilda: The Last U.S. Slave Ship

In 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, the last slave ship landed in the United States from Africa. The transatlantic slave trade had been illegal in the US since 1808, but Alabama enslaver Timothy Meaher and his friends were…
Guest: Hannah Durkin
Dec. 18, 2023

Mollie Moon

Stories of the Civil Rights Movement don’t often center the fundraisers, often Black women, whose tireless efforts made the movement possible; today we’re featuring one of those women. Mollie Moon, born in 1907, the founder …
Dec. 4, 2023

Merze Tate

Scholar Merze Tate, born in Michigan in 1905, overcame the odds in what she called a “sex and race discriminating world,” to earn graduate degrees from Oxford University and Harvard University on her way to becoming the firs…
Nov. 27, 2023

Black Civil Rights before the Civil Rights Movement

The beginning of the Civil Rights Movement is often dated to sometime in the middle of the 1950s, but the roots of it stretch back much further. The NAACP, which calls itself “the nation's largest and most widely recognized …
Sept. 4, 2023

Thomas Smallwood and the Underground Railroad

Over the course of just one year in the early 1840s, Thomas Smallwood, a recently emancipated Black man, with the assistance of the New England educated white abolitionist Charles Torrey, arranged for around 400 enslaved peo…
Guest: Scott Shane
Aug. 28, 2023

Phillis Wheatley

One of the best known poets of Revolutionary New England was an enslaved Black girl named Phillis Wheatley, who was only emancipated after she published a book of 39 of her poems in London. Wheatley, who met with Benjamin Fr…
Aug. 21, 2023

Gladys Bentley

One of the biggest stars in Prohibition Age New York was blues singer Gladys Bentley, who caused a stir in Harlem, wearing a top hat and tails, flirting with women in the audience, and singing raunchy lyrics. Despite Bentley…
July 31, 2023

Pullman Porters & the History of the Black Working Class

In the early 20th century, career options for Black workers were limited, and the jobs often came with low pay and poor conditions. Ironically, because they were concentrated in certain jobs, Black workers sometimes monopol…
July 24, 2023

History of Black Women & Physical Fitness in the United States

In 1894, Mary P. Evans, wrote in the Woman’s Era , a Black women’s magazine, that exercise: “enables you to keep in the best condition for work with the hands or with the brain… It prepares you to meet disappointment, sorrow…
Guest: Ava Purkiss
July 17, 2023

Enslaved Women who Murdered their Enslavers

In the American colonies and then in the antebellum United States, the legal system reinforced the power and authority of slaveholders by allowing them to physically abuse the people they enslaved while severely punishing en…
July 10, 2023

Jean-Baptiste Pointe DuSable, the Founder of Chicago

Sometime in the mid-1780s, Jean-Baptiste Pointe DuSable, a Black man from Saint-Domingue, and his Potawatomi wife, Kitihawa, settled with their family on a swampy site near Lake Michigan called Eschecagou, “land of the wild …
July 3, 2023

"What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?"

When Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that all men were endowed with the rights of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” he did not have in mind the rights of the hundreds of human beings he …
June 19, 2023

W. E. B. Du Bois & African American Contributions to World War I

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…
June 5, 2023

Racial Conflict in the U.S. Army During the Vietnam War Era

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…
Guest: Beth Bailey