American History - KOLUMN Magazine

America’s Black Holocaust Museum Hopes To Reopen Its Doors This Year | Wisconsin Public Radio

January 29, 2020January 29, 2020African American History, Black Holocaust Museum

Thanks To A Donation, The Museum Plans To Open In Summer 2020 [mc4wp_form id=”6042″] America’s Black Holocaust Museum (ABHM) in Milwaukee is a step closer to reopening its doors after being closed for over a decade, thanks to funding from the Greater Milwaukee Foundation. The museum was founded by lynching survivor, James Cameron in 1988. […]

‘I believe in white supremacy’: John Wayne’s notorious 1971 Playboy interview goes viral on Twitter (2019) | The Washington Post

January 29, 2020January 29, 2020Racism

John Wayne is never going to be confused for a progressive by anyone familiar with his life and career. [mc4wp_form id=”6042″] The actor was famous as one of Hollywood’s staunchest conservatives: a onetime member of the reactionary anti-Communist John Birch Society, a producer for and actor in a film about the ignominious House Un-American Activities […]

The Story of Josiah Henson, the Real Inspiration for ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ | Smithsonian Magazine

January 28, 2020January 28, 2020African American History

Before there was the novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe, a formerly enslaved African-American living in Canada wrote a memoir detailing his experience. [mc4wp_form id=”6042″] From its very first moments in print on March 20, 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a smashing success. It sold 3,000 copies on its first day, and Frederick […]

Killers’ Confession | The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi | PBS

January 24, 2020January 24, 2020African American History, Emmett Till

Killers of Emmett Till Confess in Look Magazine [mc4wp_form id=”6042″] Editors Note: In the long history of man’s inhumanity to man, racial conflict has produced some of the most horrible examples of brutality. The recent slaying of Emmett Till in Mississippi is a case in point. The editors of Look are convinced that they are […]

Virginians push to remember historically black high schools | The Washington Post

January 22, 2020January 22, 2020African American Education, African American History ...

NORFOLK, Va. — Vivian Monroe-Hester’s high school textbooks harbored hatred in their margins. [mc4wp_form id=”6042″] As a teenager at the all-black Booker T. Washington High School in segregated, 1960s-era Virginia, Monroe-Hester studied from used books passed along by white high schools. White students, knowing the texts’ final destination, scrawled their animus atop pictures, beneath paragraphs, […]

Remembering the 1968 Orangeburg Massacre When Police Shot Dead Three Unarmed Black Students | Democracy Now

January 21, 2020January 21, 2020African American History, Racism

The 1968 Orangeburg massacre is one of the most violent and least remembered events of the civil rights movement. [mc4wp_form id=”6042″] A crowd of students gathered on the campus of South Carolina State University to protest segregation at Orangeburg’s only bowling alley. After days of escalating tensions, students started a bonfire and held a vigil […]

Op-Ed: California’s forgotten slave history | Los Angeles Times

January 21, 2020African American History, Black History

Separated by just 60 miles along the I-10, Los Angeles and San Bernardino feel worlds apart. [mc4wp_form id=”6042″] The former boasts some of the richest urban developments and residential pockets in the nation. The latter — a “broken city,” as this newspaper put it in 2015 — struggled through five years of bankruptcy and municipal […]

Born Into Slavery, This Centenarian Learned to Read at 116, Becoming the Nation’s Oldest Student | Black Enterprise

January 13, 2020June 19, 2020African American History, Black History

Selena Hill, Black Enterprise Despite being born into slavery and enduring over a century of discrimination, Mary Hardway Walker managed to accomplish an extraordinary feat. At 116 years old, she learned to read. Walker was born in Union Springs, Alabama, in 1848 and lived in bondage until she was freed at the age of 15 following […]

Does the United States Owe Reparations to the Descendants of Enslaved People? | The New York Times

January 8, 2020January 8, 2020African American History, Reparations

The idea of economic amends for past injustices and persistent disparities is getting renewed attention. What do you think should happen? [mc4wp_form id=”6042″] In 1988, President Ronald Reagan sought to “right a grave wrong” by signing legislation that apologized for the government’s forced relocation of 120,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II and established a $1.25 […]

America Has Tried Reparations Before. Here Is How It Went. | The New York Times

January 7, 2020January 7, 2020African American History, Black History ...

With a renewed focus on reparations for slavery, what lessons can be drawn from payments to victims of other historical injustices in America? [mc4wp_form id=”6042″] Ever since a Union Army general announced in Galveston, Tex., that “all slaves are free” on June 19, 1865 — a day now commemorated as Juneteenth — the question of […]