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
...the violence that defeated Reconstruction. Lynchings of African Americans in Memphis and New Orleans, and the slaughter of at least 71 blacks in Colfax, Louisiana, in 1873, were not discussed...
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...
The Uneasy History of Integrated Sports in America
...Mississippi the last SEC school to integrate its team in 1971. This led to the paradoxical situation in which “people with bitter racial opinions about blacks in general would display...
Charlottesville Syllabus: Readings on the History of Hate in America
...place on August 12 in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the violent aftermath. JSTOR Daily, which offers scholarly context to the news, seems well-positioned to provide help in this regard. Here, we...
The Devastation of Black Wall Street
...of the era equated improvements in “wages and working conditions” as communistic threats. In essence, whites were resentful that blacks no longer passively accepted second-class citizenship in their own homeland....
Book Club Made Me Gay
...didn’t join another book club until I was a questioning twenty-something in Philadelphia. Doing so was a major step in coming into queerness. In Justin Torres’s We the Animals, the...
Race and Labor in the 1863 New York City Draft Riots
...remains the most significant insurrection by civilians in American history. Opposition to the Civil War was largely fueled by a fear of newly freed blacks moving north and taking over...
Old English Has a Serious Image Problem
...At the same time, however, the study of Anglo-Saxon played a part in the more general cultural belief—prevalent at the time—in the superiority of northern European or “Anglo-Saxon” whiteness. In...
The History of the KKK in American Politics
...decisions about state business. The situation wasn’t better in the West. In 1920s Colorado, the Klan “could well believe they owned the state,” wrote the hisorian Carl Abbott in Colorado:...