Category: Black History

In “Finish the Fight!,” excerpted here, New York Times journalists tell the stories of lesser-known figures in the battle to make the 19th Amendment a reality. — Veronica Chambers, Jennifer Schuessler, Amisha Padnani, Jennifer Harlan, Sandra E. Garcia & Vivian Wang, The New York Times “Finish the Fight!” is a book about the American suffrage movement for middle-grade readers. The following […]

Free and enslaved Black Christians met at this site during the American Revolution to worship. Now archeologists are trying to learn more about them. — Jewel Wicker, NBC News A gathering in 1776 on a plantation of enslaved and free Black people in colonial Virginia established what would become one of America’s first known Black […]

What happens to the Black girls who are haunted by traumatic experiences every day, the ones who often don’t have their stories told, nor the support they need to help pull them through? — Latosha Brown, Essence Say their names: Addie Mae Collins. Cynthia Wesley. Carole Robertson. Carol Denise McNair. On September 15th, 1963 in Birmingham, […]

— EJI Staff, EJI, Equal Justice Initiative On September 10, 1963, white students began to withdraw from newly-integrated Tuskegee High School in Alabama to avoid attending school with Black students. Within one week, all 275 white students had stopped attending the school. In January 1963, African American parents of students in Macon County, Alabama, sued […]

This story is excerpted and adapted from Jerry Mikorenda’s book, America’s First Freedom Rider: Elizabeth Jennings, Chester A. Arthur, and the Early Fight for Civil Rights. — Jerry Mikorenda, Atlas Obscura Eighteen fifty-four was a year of extremes in New York City. As noted in the New York Daily Times, “it was remarkable for wrecks, murders, swindles, defalcations, […]

— The Associated Press, NBC News On September 6th, 1913, twelve Black men held at a prison farm in Richmond, Texas, were placed in an underground cell as punishment for not picking cotton fast enough. Eight of those men died of asphyxiation. The cell was nine feet long, seven feet wide, and seven feet high, […]

— DeNeen L. Brown, The Washington Post Survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre filed a lawsuit Tuesday, demanding that the city “repair the damage” caused by the attack, which historians believe left as many as 300 Black people dead and 10,000 without homes and destroyed 40 square blocks of Greenwood. The lawsuit, which was […]

The Commission on Chicago Landmarks granted preliminary landmark status Thursday to the home of Emmett Till, at 6427 S. St. Lawrence Ave. in Woodlawn. — Maudlyne Ihejirika, Chicago Sun Times Emmett Till’s home on the South Side was granted preliminary landmark status Thursday — on the same date that the teen’s historic open-casket funeral was […]

People of color are informing others of those who need their flowers — Nicole Froio, Zora, Medium Until recently, Instagram was not known for its political potential. The app was widely understood as the land of influencers, curated realities, and vapidness — and though its political potential has recently been harnessed by the proliferation of social […]

— Emily Underwood and Shakia Gullette Missouri Historical Society, The St. Louis American For some women, the centennial of the 19th Amendment granting suffrage to women is a moment for celebration, but for countless other women it serves as a reminder of the race-based exclusion that tainted much of the suffrage movement and its representation […]