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
...Black performers often performing with the same burnt cork painted faces as stereotyping Whites. Historian James Dormon writes that they were “blacks playing whites playing blacks,” but that the performer’s...
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...
The Detroit Rebellion
...Until the great migration north, most Black workers were agricultural workers. When, alongside many white workers, they migrated to cities in the North, a new Black industrial working class would...
Juneteenth and the Emancipation Proclamation
...(2004): 1-22. “In the jubilation that surrounded the arrival of emancipation, free blacks in the North and enslaved blacks in the South rejoiced at the sound of Lincoln’s name and...
Ye Olde Morality-Enforcement Brigades
...North American versions of this boisterous practice during its last hurrah in the late nineteenth century. There were different kinds of charivari, in both the city and the country, explains...
Why Ulysses S. Grant Was More Important Than You Think
...gesture of unity between North and South, with an eye toward reconciliation after the war. But Johnson was unsuited to the tasks of Reconstruction, particularly leading the Republic in accepting...
The Case for Reparations Is Nothing New
...National Coalition of Blacks in North America. Why, some may ask, is Dorothy Lewis referred to as Queen Mother within the grassroots reparations movement? Her organization, N’Cobra, conferred the name...
The Gospel According to Kanye West
...to go international in 2020. The Origins of Gospel Choirs Gospel music was birthed “in the storefront churches of the North and South” during the first two decades of the...