When Duke Ellington and his band toured the segregated South in the early 1930s, they encountered racism wherever they went. A gorgeous black performer also traveled with the band—Frederika “Fredi” Washington. Lithe and light-skinned, she was pale enough to “pass” as white in the ...read more
History is usually written by the winners. But that wasn’t the case when The Birth of a Nation was released on February 8, 1915. In just over three hours, D.W. Griffith’s controversial epic film about the Civil War and Reconstruction depicted the Ku Klux Klan as valiant saviors ...read more
Martha Gadley’s marriage was a nightmare. When her husband drank, he turned increasingly violent. One night, he used an ax to chop a hole in the floor and threatened to push her into the room below. He refused to bring her water when she was sick. When she left the house, he ...read more
Hiram Rhodes Revels arrived on Capitol Hill to take his seat as the first black member of the U.S. Congress in 1870. But first, the Mississippi Republican faced Democrats determined to block him.The Constitution requires senators to hold citizenship for at least nine years, and ...read more
Among the white supremacist members of the Ku Klux Klan, Ron Stallworth stood out for a couple reasons: he was an undercover officer and he was a black man. In the fall of 1978, at the Colorado Springs Police Department, Stallworth saw an ad in the local newspaper calling for new ...read more
In 1926, a self-taught musician named Big Bill Broonzy found his way to Chicago. A sharecropper turned soldier, he had left Mississippi and headed north to escape the pervasive racism of the Jim Crow South along with thousands of others of African-Americans in the Great ...read more
Journalist Ida B. Wells was already out of town when she realized that an editorial she’d written had caused a riot. In 1892, Wells had left Memphis to attend a conference in Philadelphia, when the office of the newspaper she co-owned was destroyed and her co-editor was run out ...read more
One night in October 1983, two white men waited outside a local dance club near Sunny Side, Georgia for a black man, Timothy Coggins. Coggins was young, exuberant, loved to dance—and was known to date white women. When Coggins emerged, according to court testimony, they lured him ...read more
Like many veterans of the killing fields of World War I, Horace Pippin had a tough time shaking off the memories. So in the decade after the war he captured them, and tamed them, inside sketch-filled journals.He had no dearth of stories to tell. There was the terrified young ...read more
He was known as the Galveston Giant—a boxer who fought his way toward the first world heavyweight title held by an African-American. But in 1912, Jack Johnson became something else: a wanted man. Accused of violating the Mann Act, which forbade transporting a woman across state ...read more
The civil rights movement was a fight for equal rights under the law for African Americans during the 1950s and 1960s. Centuries of prejudice and discrimination fueled the crusade, but World War II and its aftermath were arguably the main catalysts.A. Philip Randolph’s crusade ...read more
For most black Americans descended from enslaved Africans, there’s no way of tracing back where their ancestors came from. There’s also no way of discovering, as Malcolm Xemphasized, their “true family name.” The slave trade ripped families apart, and records from slave ships and ...read more
The Rosewood Massacre was an attack on the predominantly African-American town of Rosewood, Florida, in 1845 by large groups of whites. The town was entirely destroyed by the end of the violence, and the residents were driven out permanently. The story was mostly forgotten until ...read more
As the freight train whisked its way over the Alabama rails in 1931, nine boys’ lives were changed forever. The details of their skirmish with a group of white men and two women on the train are still unclear. But by the end of the train ride, nine young men—all African-American, ...read more
When the musical Hair premiered on Broadway on April 29, 1968, the theater world was shocked, horrified, and delighted. The show introduced the rock musical—and nudity—to the Broadway stage in a story that brought the psychedelic hippie culture to life and engaged in a frank ...read more
Four U.S. presidents have been murdered while in office – all were brought down by gunfire. And each of these presidential assassinations helped usher in a wave of important reforms and a new political era.Abraham Lincoln’s assassination dramatically changed the Reconstruction ...read more
Confederate President Jefferson Davis occupied an anxious home in Richmond, Virginia, during the Civil War. A steady leak of information dripped from the highest ranks of the Confederacy to the Union. Davis was wary of a mole in his house, but had no idea how to stop the flow of ...read more
If you walked across the campus of Columbia University in April 1968, you may have been handed a typewrittenflyer inviting you to a campus protest. “The big steal is on,” it declared. Columbia was in the process of stealing land and resources from nearby Harlem, the flyer ...read more
Attempts to reckon with America’s history of racism have been difficult in the South, particularly the deep South states of Alabama and Mississippi. They are the onlytwo states that celebrate Martin Luther King and Robert E. Lee’s birth on the same day. But on ...read more
Lasting from 1929 to 1939, the Great Depression was the worst economic downtown in the industrialized world. While no group escaped the economic devastation of the Great Depression, few suffered more than African Americans. Said to be “last hired, first fired,” African Americans ...read more
It was an electric day in Detroit for those passing through Cobo Hall at a NAACP celebration dinner in April of 1995. Rosa Parks and her niece, Urana McCauley, had come for the event following the death of McCauley’s grandmother. At just 19 years old, McCauley was in awe. The ...read more
Jackie Robinson became the first African American to play in the Major Leagues on April 15, 1947, when he took the field in the top of the first inning against the Boston Braves. When Robinson took his spot at first base, he broke baseball’s 50-year-old color barrier, which not ...read more
There’s another Black Panther movie in the works. This one, however, isn’t about the comic book superheroes that broke box office records in 2018 or the 1970s black activist group. It’s about the original Black Panthers: World War II’s 761st tank battalion.In October of 1944, the ...read more
The Orangeburg Massacre occurred on the night of February 8, 1968, when a civil rights protest at South Carolina State University (SC State) turned deadly after highway patrolmen opened fire on about 200 unarmed black student protestors. Three young men were shot and killed, and ...read more