Category: Black History

By EJI Staff, EJI, Equal Justice Initiative On July 8, 1860, more than 50 years after Congress banned the importation of enslaved Africans into the United States, the slave ship Clotilde arrived in Mobile, Alabama, carrying more than 100 enslaved people from West Africa. Captain William Foster commanded the boat, and was later said to be working […]

By NPR Staff, NPR The U.S. celebrates this Independence Day amid nationwide protests and calls for systemic reforms. In this short film, five young descendants of Frederick Douglass read and respond to excerpts of his famous speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” which asks all of us to consider America’s long […]

By EJI Staff, EJI, Equal Justice Initiative The Freedmen’s Savings and Trust Company, more commonly referred to as The Freedmen’s Bank, failed in June 1874, taking with it millions of dollars in black wealth. The bank was first incorporated on March 3, 1865, the same day the Freedmen’s Bureau was created, and formed to help previously enslaved […]

By Good Black News Staff, Good Black News NASA announced Wednesday the agency’s headquarters building in Washington, D.C., will be named after Mary W. Jackson, the first African American female engineer at NASA. Jackson started her NASA career in the segregated West Area Computing Unit of the agency’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. Jackson, a mathematician and aerospace […]

By Sylviane A. Diouf, PHD, National Geographic She was just two years old when she arrived in Mobile, Alabama, in July 1860, a captive aboard the infamous Clotilda, the last known slave ship to bring Africans to America. She died in 1940 at the age 82, making her the last known survivor of the last known slave ship. […]

By Rebecca Onion, Slate In the 1930s, the federal government sent (mostly white) interviewers to learn about slavery from former slaves. Can we trust the stories they brought back? When Josephine Anderson, a formerly enslaved Floridian, was visited by a white government interviewer in the fall of 1937, she told him a ghost story. Anderson described to […]

By Risa Sarachan, Forbes Filmmaker Dawn Porter knows a good story when she sees one. The prolific, award-winning documentary filmmaker, known for her films Trapped, Spies of Mississippi, and Bobby Kennedy for President, among others, has made a new autobiographical film about the life of Congressman John Lewis, and it couldn’t be coming out at a better moment in time. […]

By Rebecca Shabad, NBC News Juneteenth is currently recognized by 47 states and the District of Columbia as a state holiday or observance. WASHINGTON — Senators on Friday announced legislation to make Juneteenth, a widely observed holiday that marks the federal order to free slaves in Texas on June 19, 1865, a national holiday. Also known as Emancipation Day, […]

By Michael S. Rosenwald, The Washington Post Racial terror followed passage of the 13th Amendment in 1865 In December 1865, seven months after President Abraham Lincoln took a bullet to the head at Ford’s Theatre, the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified with these words: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for […]

By Zak Cheney-Rice, Intelligencer Oklahoma’s Education Department is adding the 1921 Tulsa race massacre to its curriculum for the first time, in a move that doubles as a contingency to stop the tragedy’s centennial from devolving into a pile-on of the state’s failure to fully reckon with the tragedy. CNN reports that the decision was announced on […]