To foreigners, he was a fellow traveler who recognized the plight of the oppressed. Introduction A leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance, the inspiration behind Lorraine Hansberry’s play “A Raisin in the Sun” and an uncompromising voice for social justice, Langston Hughes is heralded as one of America’s greatest poets. It wasn’t always this way.[…]
How the work of African American clubwomen deepens our understanding of the Great Migration and the Progressive Era. Introduction When one considers the typical Progressive Era (1890-1930) reformer, figures such as Jane Addams, founder of Hull House, John Dewey, educational reformer, or political progressives, like Robert La Follette or Teddy Roosevelt come to mind. All[…]
Hallie Quinn Brown and other “homespun heroines”. Hallie Quinn Brown knew the power of black women and urged anyone who heard her to let it flourish. Read her remarks from 1889 and you might believe she saw the future or at least had the capacity to call it into being: “I believe there are as[…]
Mary McLeod Bethune founded a college, defied the Klan, advised presidents, and was a fierce warrior for justice. By Dovey Johnson Roundtree, J.D.Late Attorney and Acvitist Born in 1914, Dovey Johnson Roundtree was subject to the double barriers of institutionalized racism and sexism, but rose from poverty to become a distinguished champion of civil and[…]
Maggie Lena Walker was one of the most important Black businesswomen in the nation, and today too few people have heard of her. Maggie Lena Walker was the first Black woman in the nation to organize and run a bank. And she did it in the segregated South in the former capital of the Confederacy,[…]
Bessie’s voice was elemental, a force set free from deep inside the world. It was a hot show that night, in that big tent out in the muddy field. Everybody had fun, though most people were tired; it was the end of a long T.O.B.A. circuit tour for the acts and of a long day[…]
Native American assistance to freedom seekers crossing through the Midwest has largely been erased from Underground Railroad studies. In an interview conducted in 2002, the late Helen Hornbeck Tanner, an influential historian of the Native American experience in the Midwest best known for her magisterial Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History (1987), reflected on the considerable record[…]
Two factors overlapped to result in the genocide of the Kikotan people. Reckoning with the past is never easy. We’ve seen this in the United States and the United Kingdom this summer, as British universities grapple with their connections to the wealth and human suffering resulting from transatlantic enslavement, and Americans debate the historical meaning of the 400th anniversary of[…]
A 19th-century volume contained a mystery for two historians who combined their knowledge to tell the story of the women and their contributions to American democracy. Introduction We are two historians whose work focuses on American art and on how African Americans have shaped the story of American democracy. Our two subject areas converged recently[…]
Placing special emphasis on visual culture in the forms of photographs and postcards, Goldstein unpacks the complicated history of St. Augustine’s Slave Market. Introduction At the center of the historic quarter in St. Augustine, Florida, stands the “old slave market,” an open-air pavilion where enslaved Africans were bought and sold (Figures 1–3). Since its construction[…]
Assisted by Native Americans, they moved – and fought. Introduction In 1861, as Confederate armies prepared to crush the Union, President Lincoln commanded only 13,000 men and officers. At this moment ragged immigrant invaders seeking asylum reached the southern border of Kansas. Surrounded in Oklahoma on three sides by slaveholding states, they found themselves defenseless when[…]
For nearly a century, Quilombo of Palmares was an Afro-Brazilian state, populated and run by people who had freed themselves from slavery. By Matthew Wills Brazil is the fifth most populous country in the world, so perhaps it’s not surprising that the country has a complex racial history. For instance, how many Americans know that[…]
Typical narratives about 1919’s anti-black collective violence, especially in school textbooks, often conclude abruptly. This summer marks the hundredth anniversary of 1919’s Red Summer, when, from May to November, the nation experienced ten major “race riots” that took the lives of more than 350 people, almost all black. How should the challenging but essential task[…]
The art of Florida’s Highwaymen finds a new audience. It was an era when most African Americans in Fort Pierce were relegated to working in kitchens or fields, when Jim Crow prevented them from using the same water fountains as whites, and few, if any, black artists could be found in history books. Despite the[…]
Recruits in the first African-American Marine Corps trained at Montford Point, eventually ending the military’s longstanding policy of racial segregation. The year was 1941. The United States was preparing to enter World War II, and it needed recruits. But President Franklin D. Roosevelt faced a problem. Hiring discrimination based on race was still the norm[…]
The United States Colored Troops (USCT) was a branch of the United States Army founded in 1863. Introduction The United States Colored Troops (USCT) was a branch of the United States Army founded in 1863 to recruit, organize, and oversee the service of African American soldiers during the American Civil War (1861–1865). USCT regiments consisted of[…]
Transformed in the 1950s from a sharecropper shack that was built probably in the 1920s, Poor Monkey’s Lounge is the one of the last rural jook joints in the Mississippi Delta. Overview Transformed in the 1950s from a sharecropper shack that was built probably in the 1920s, Poor Monkey’s Lounge is the one of the[…]