Black History
Black History Month is an annual celebration of achievements by African Americans and a time for recognizing their central role in U.S. history. From Harriet Tubman’s Underground Railroad to the Montgomery Bus Boycott to Selma to Montgomery March to the Black Lives Matter movement, Black leaders, artists and writers have helped shaped the character and identity of a nation.
Black History Videos
Black History Stories
How Angela Davis Ended Up on the FBI Most Wanted List
On August 18, 1970, Angela Yvonne Davis became the third woman ever placed on the FBI’s Top 10 Most Wanted Fugitives list, sought for her supposed involvement in kidnappings and murders growing out of an armed seizure of a Marin County Courthouse in California. Until her arrest ...read more
Langston Hughes' Path to Becoming the ‘People’s Poet’
Langston Hughes was a defining figure of the 1920s Harlem Renaissance as an influential poet, playwright, novelist, short story writer, essayist, political commentator and social activist. Known as a poet of the people, his work focused on the everyday lives of the Black working ...read more
Basquiat and Warhol: Inside Their Unlikely Artistic Collaborations
It’s one of the most intriguing—and head-scratching—friendships in recent art history. Today, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol are seen as two of the most innovative, influential artists of the late 20th century. Their works sell for tens of millions of dollars, routinely ...read more
Maya Angelou Thrived in Multiple Careers Before Becoming a Writer
When Maya Angelou published 1969’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the bestselling autobiography that would be adapted into a television movie and make her a household name, she was already in her 40s with a variety of career experiences. Angelou was an actor, dancer, activist ...read more
How Neighborhoods Used Restrictive Housing Covenants to Block Nonwhite Families
In 1945, J.D. and Ethel Lee Shelley, an African American couple, purchased a home for their family in a white St. Louis, Missouri neighborhood. Problem was: In selling the modest, two-story brick dwelling to a Black family, the home’s white owners had defied a 34-year-old ...read more
6 Strategies Harriet Tubman and Others Used to Escape Along the Underground Railroad
Despite the horrors of slavery, it was no easy decision to flee. Escaping often involved leaving behind family and heading into the complete unknown, where harsh weather and lack of food might await. Then there was the constant threat of capture. So-called slave catchers and ...read more
After the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman Led a Brazen Civil War Raid
They called her “Moses” for leading enslaved people in the South to freedom up North. But Harriet Tubman fought the institution of slavery well beyond her role as a conductor for the Underground Railroad. As a soldier and spy for the Union Army during the Civil War, Tubman became ...read more
Why Frederick Douglass Wanted Black Men to Fight in the Civil War
During the Civil War, Frederick Douglass used his stature as the most prominent African American social reformer, orator, writer and abolitionist to recruit men of his race to volunteer for the Union army. In his “Men of Color to Arms! Now or Never!” broadside, Douglass called on ...read more
6 Black Heroes of the Civil War
As America’s Civil War raged, with the enslavement of millions of people hanging in the balance, African Americans didn’t just sit on the sidelines. Whether enslaved, escaped or born free, many sought to actively affect the outcome. From fighting on bloody battlefields to ...read more
Black Civil War Soldiers
On January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation: “All persons held as slaves within any States…in rebellion against the United States,” it declared, “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.” (The more than 1 million enslaved people in ...read more
9 Black Athletes Who Integrated Professional Sports
After Jackie Robinson started at first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947, ending a six-decade ban on Black players in Major League Baseball, opportunities slowly began to expand for athletes of color. Robinson’s historic achievement—a formative moment of the postwar ...read more
How an Enslaved Man Helped Jack Daniel Develop His Famous Whiskey
Jack Daniel’s stands as one of the most iconic American brands and most popular spirits in the world. Yet while the whiskey and its eponymous founder have become dominant names in American liquor lore, the person perhaps most responsible for its success—an enslaved man named ...read more
The Buffalo Soldiers at San Juan Hill: What Really Happened?
It remains one of the most mythologized images of the Spanish-American war: Theodore Roosevelt charging on horseback, leading his Rough Rider volunteers up Cuba’s San Juan Hill through the smoke and chaos of battle to claim a decisive victory. Carefully crafted by Roosevelt ...read more
This Woman Built a Formidable Gambling Empire in 1920s Harlem
Madame Stephanie St. Clair was a Harlem entrepreneur with a head for numbers and a skill for minting cash—even during the Great Depression. But like most African Americans in the early 20th century, she found herself barred from traditional, white-dominated financial businesses ...read more
6 Decades Before Jackie Robinson, This Man Broke Baseball's Color Barrier
Sixty-three years before Jackie Robinson became the first African American in the modern era to play in a Major League Baseball game, Moses Fleetwood Walker debuted in the league on May 1, 1884, with the Toledo Blue Stockings in a 5-1 loss against the Louisville Eclipse. Walker, ...read more
Jackie Robinson: His Life and Career in Pictures
When Jackie Robinson started at first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947, he not only integrated Major League Baseball. He was signaling to the nation—on one of its biggest stages—that Black Americans would no longer accept second-class status. “Jackie Robinson ...read more
Famous Amos: The Rise and Fall of a Cookie Empire
When Wally Amos founded Famous Amos cookies in 1975, the brand became one of the most unlikely success stories in food history. And the rise and fall of Wally Amos became one of its most infamous cautionary tales. Here’s how a man who broke the color barrier in the talent ...read more
The Nubian Queen Who Fought Back Caesar's Army
From 25 to 21 B.C. Amanirenas, a queen or Kandake of the Kingdom of Kush, managed to do what many male leaders in her time could not: push back a Roman invasion. Under Queen Amanirenas’ command, some 30,000 soldiers of the ancient Kingdom of Kush (located in modern-day Sudan) ...read more
How Madam C.J. Walker Became a Self-Made Millionaire
As the end of Reconstruction ushered in a volatile period in which former Confederate states instituted laws that severely restricted the upward mobility of African Americans, life for Black people largely remained just as harsh as it was during slavery. Black residents along the ...read more
How NAACP's Walter White Risked His Life to Investigate Lynchings
For Walter White, growing up Black and being able to “pass” as white empowered him to take on two identities that aided his work with the NAACP exposing racial injustice in the United States. White was born blonde-haired and blue-eyed in 1893 in Atlanta, Georgia, to a family ...read more
The First Black War Correspondent Reported from the Civil War's Front Lines
During the Civil War, hundreds of reporters from Union and Confederate newspapers published stories from battles on land and sea. Only one of those reporters was a Black man: Thomas Morris Chester, the nation’s first African American war correspondent. The invention of the ...read more
Female Warriors Who Led African Empires and Armies
Long before—and during— the European colonization of Africa, ancient kingdoms and empires thrived for centuries on the continent. Some were headed by women, including female warriors who led armies against invading European powers to defend their people from conquest and ...read more
How the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Created the African Diaspora
The trans-Atlantic slave trade was the capture, forcible transport and sale of native Africans to Europeans for lifelong bondage in the Americas. Lasting from the 16th to 19th centuries, it is responsible, more than any other project or phenomenon in the history of the modern ...read more
The First African Americans to Win Olympic Medals
Since the first Olympic Games debuted in Athens, Greece in 1896, the gathering of the world’s dominant athletes has become a global event. But with historic discrimination and fewer opportunities for elite training, Black athletes faced immense challenges to compete. Nonetheless, ...read more
8 Key Laws That Advanced Civil Rights
The "peculiar institution” of slavery was abolished nearly a hundred years after the Declaration of Independence called for freedom and equality for all in 1776. But it took another century before landmark legislation would begin to address basic civil rights for African ...read more
7 Writers of the Harlem Renaissance
In the early 20th century, millions of African Americans migrated from the rural South to the urban North to seek economic opportunity and escape widespread racial prejudice, segregation and violence. Many of them settled in the New York City neighborhood of Harlem, which became ...read more
Quotes from 7 of Martin Luther King Jr.'s Most Notable Speeches
Martin Luther King Jr. was one of the most influential figures of the American civil rights movement—and a gifted orator. His stirring speeches touched on everything from social and racial justice, to nonviolence, poverty, the Vietnam War and dismantling white supremacy. And ...read more
How Southern Landowners Tried to Restrict the Great Migration
When more than six million African Americans left the South for better opportunities in the North and West, between 1916 and 1970, their relocation changed the demographic landscape of the United States and much of the agricultural labor force in the South. This decades-long, ...read more
How Bobby Grier Integrated One of College Football's Biggest Games
The day after a Black woman refused to yield her bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama, America’s latest battle over civil rights garnered front-page headlines. The news stories capturing the country’s attention in early December 1955 did not concern Rosa Parks, however, but University ...read more
Lee Elder becomes first Black golfer to play in Masters
On April 10, 1975, 41-year-old Lee Elder becomes the first Black golfer to play in the Masters, considered the most prestigious event in the sport. Elder shoots 37 on the front and back nine for a 74 at the Augusta (Georgia) National Golf Club and trails leader Bobby Nichols by ...read more
The Assassination of Malcolm X
Civil rights leader Malcolm X took the stage at the Audubon Ballroom in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan on February 21, 1965. Just minutes later, shortly after 3 p.m., the former prominent Nation of Islam figure was gunned down by three men as his wife, Betty ...read more
The Black Trailblazer Who's the Only Person in Baseball, Basketball Halls of Fame
Cumberland Posey, the only person in the Baseball and Basketball Halls of Fame, was not only an excellent athlete. He also was one of the shrewdest businessmen and talent evaluators in the Negro Leagues, a fierce advocate for Black baseball and a sports pioneer. Early in the 20th ...read more
How Black Women Fought for Civil War Pensions and Benefits
Over two million soldiers enlisted in the Union Army during the U.S. Civil War. When it ended, the United States had many more veterans and surviving dependents than it had ever had before. In the decades that followed, military pensions became a major part of the federal budget, ...read more
9 Baseball Stars From the Negro Leagues Who Dominated the Game
Until Jackie Robinson broke the Major League Baseball color line in 1947, Black Americans' professional baseball opportunities were limited primarily to the Negro Leagues. These leagues showcased impressive talent, from power hitters Buck Leonard and Josh Gibson to pitchers ...read more
How Interstate Highways Gutted Communities—and Reinforced Segregation
When Congress approved the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, it authorized what was then the largest public works program in U.S. history. The law promised to construct 41,000 miles of an ambitious interstate highway system that would criss-cross the nation, dramatically ...read more
Dunmore's Proclamation
On November 7, 1775, John Murray, fourth Earl of Dunmore and governor of the British colony of Virginia, wrote the document known as Dunmore’s Proclamation. It promised freedom to any indentured servants, enslaved African Americans, or others held in bondage by American ...read more
The 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre: How Fearmongering Led to Violence
In the center of downtown Atlanta, a handful of streets intersect, forming what locals know as Five Points. Today, a park, a university, high-rise buildings and throngs of motorists and pedestrians make this a bustling area, belying its history of bloodshed. In 1906, Five Points ...read more
How the Only Woman in Baseball Hall of Fame Challenged Convention—and MLB
Effa Manley, the only woman in the National Baseball Hall of Fame, was an advocate for Black athletes, a passionate supporter of baseball in the Negro leagues, a champion for civil rights and equality…and far ahead of her time. In an era when few women were involved in sports ...read more
SNCC
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was founded in 1960 in the wake of student-led sit-ins at segregated lunch counters across the South and became the major channel of student participation in the civil rights movement. Members of SNCC included prominent future ...read more
How Nelson Mandela Used Rugby as a Symbol of South African Unity
On June 24, 1995 at Johannesburg's Ellis Park Stadium, South Africa won the Rugby World Cup 15-12 over its arch rival New Zealand. The match stands as a hugely symbolic moment in South African history. It marked the nation’s first major sporting event since the end of its ...read more
Why the FBI Saw Martin Luther King Jr. as a Communist Threat
In early 1962, Attorney General Robert Kennedy approved a request from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to install wiretaps on the home and office of a New York City-based lawyer named Stanley David Levison. According to FBI informants, Levison had been an influential member of the ...read more
The 1967 Riots: When Outrage Over Racial Injustice Boiled Over
During the summer of 1967, 158 riots erupted in urban communities across America. Most shared the same triggering event: a dispute between Black citizens and white police officers that escalated to violence. During those convulsive months, the massive social unrest—alternately ...read more
Why Mixed-Race Children in Post-WWII Germany Were Deemed a ‘Social Problem’
After Allied Forces defeated Germany in World War II, the United States began its occupation of West Germany from 1945 to 1955. Although American soldiers were tasked with promoting democracy to a country ravaged by fascism, Jim Crow prevailed in the U.S. military and Black GIs ...read more
'Black Wall Street' Before, During and After the Tulsa Race Massacre: PHOTOS
At the turn of the 20th century, African Americans founded and developed the Greenwood district in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Built on what had formerly been Indian Territory, the community grew and flourished as a Black economic and cultural mecca—until May 31, 1921. That's when a white ...read more
Cicada Swarms Were Documented by a Black Naturalist in the 18th Century
In the spring of 1749, the billions-strong swarm of cicadas known today as Brood X emerged from the ground in rural Maryland, much to the fascination (and horror) of a 17-year-old Black tobacco farmer named Benjamin Banneker, who believed they were a plague of locusts. “The ...read more
The Unsung African American Scientists of the Manhattan Project
During the height of World War II between 1942 and 1945, the U.S. government’s top-secret program to build an atomic bomb, code-named the Manhattan Project, cumulatively employed some 600,000 people, including scientists, technicians, janitors, engineers, chemists, maids and day ...read more
9 Entrepreneurs Who Helped Build Tulsa's 'Black Wall Street'
As more is learned about the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, including the discovery of mass graves, the stories of the African Americans who turned the city’s Greenwood district into “Black Wall Street” are equally as revealing. Before a white mob decimated 35 blocks of a thriving ...read more
History Shorts: The Story Behind Kwanzaa
Kwanzaa didn't just appear spontaneously—it was specifically designed to heal a struggling community.
What Role Did Airplanes Play in the Tulsa Race Massacre?
What role did airplanes play in the deadly Tulsa race massacre of 1921? Just after Memorial Day that year, a white mob destroyed 35 city blocks of the Greenwood District, a community in Tulsa, Oklahoma known as the “Black Wall Street.” Prompted by an allegation that a Black man ...read more
How Jim Crow-Era Laws Suppressed the African American Vote for Generations
Following the ratification in 1870 of the 15th Amendment, which barred states from depriving citizens the right to vote based on race, southern states began enacting measures such as poll taxes, literacy tests, all-white primaries, felony disenfranchisement laws, grandfather ...read more