A Colorblind Compromise?
...state, then states with more enslaved people would also have a higher tax liability. Revisiting this fateful debate, scholar and sociologist Kasey Henricks writes: “This framing positioned the North to...
The Scholars Charting Black Music’s Timeline: Earl Stewart and Michael Veal
...discuss the long lineage of music as it stretches from the African continent to North America via the slave trade. Blending their music with European musical forms, enslaved Africans—and later...
Northern Civil Rights and Republican Affirmative Action
Histories of the US Civil Rights era concentrate on the South, where customary and legal racial segregation was most manifest, and most murderous. What happened in the North? Plenty, writes...
Black Soldier Desertion in the Civil War
...well as in the North feared arming Blacks would inspire slave rebellions and attacks on whites. The great majority of African American soldiers “adjusted to military life and proved courageous,”...
Freedom Libraries and the Fight for Library Equity
...South, “the vast majority, approximately fifty, were located in Mississippi.” There were also Black-only library days, and rules which “permitted Blacks to come in and check out books but not...
Adolph Reed Jr.: The Perils of Race Reductionism
...D.C., Arkansas, and eventually New Orleans, which he considers home—and often found himself discussing politics around the dinner table. When he became a student at the University of North Carolina,...
The First Vietnamese in America
...of a Vietnamese in America” is in a 1912 letter from New York City. The author, Nguyễn Tất Thành, got to North America working in the kitchen of a French...
How to Gather the Oral Histories of COVID-19
...part of North Brooklyn Narratives, a volunteer-led neighborhood oral history of 2020, which I launched this summer through North Brooklyn Mutual Aid, to collect and preserve stories, experiences, and memories...
When Black Celebrities Wore Blackface
...many African Americans coming north in the earliest waves of the Great Migration, was full of stoops stuffed with folks trying to beat the heat. In the early morning hours...
Morgan Jerkins: Exploring the Multitudes within American Blackness
The story of displacement is the story of Black lives in America. Between 1916 and 1970, six million African Americans left the South and headed elsewhere—to the North, West, Midwest—in...