Who Were the Montford Point Marines?
...Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters—was planning a march on Washington to pressure Roosevelt to open up the defense industry to blacks. But the president resisted. The Commandant of the Marine...
Should Walt Whitman Be #Cancelled?
In 2013, Timothy McNair, a black, gay graduate student in music at Northwestern University, refused to perform Howard Hanson’s “Song of Democracy,” a musical piece with lyrics derived from Walt...
Affirmative Action: Foundations and Key Concepts
...adoption occurred in the early 1960s, by colleges in the North that were inspired by the nonviolent civil rights protests occurring in the South. The second wave of adoption emerged...
Whitewashing American History
...the Revolutionary War site of Yorktown, Williamsburg (capital of Virginia from 1699-1780), and Jamestown (the first permanent English settlement in North America, 1607) via a connecting scenic parkway. The impetus...
Did Kongolese Catholicism Lead to Slave Revolutions?
...slaves on the shores of North America. They were former subjects of the Christian Kingdom of Kongo, founded by Nzinga a Nkuwu, who was baptized in 1491. Nkuwu “rebranded” himself...
Racial Violence as Impetus for the Great Migration
...as whites sought to keep blacks in their subservient and impoverished position in southern society…Many blacks responded to this threat by fleeing to less violent surroundings. It’s hardly surprising that...
Seymour Hersh on the Future of American Journalism
...because the white working class walked away from them. And by the way, blacks didn’t come out for Obama as much as the public thinks they would, because they got...
Who Gets to Make Commencement Speeches (and Why)?
In December 1996, the communications scholar Michael Eric Dyson, then at the University of North Carolina, delivered the commencement address to fall graduates and their families. A “hip-hop intellectual” and...
Revisiting Reconstruction
...inevitable, it is equally certain that Reconstruction transformed the lives of southern blacks in ways unmeasurable by statistics and in areas unreachable by law. It raised blacks’ expectations and aspirations,...
The People’s Grocery Lynching, Memphis, Tennessee
...Civil War, racial tensions in the South remained high. As blacks began to rid themselves of debt, white Southerners turned to racial violence, targeting blacks who they perceived as having...