Bolívar in Haiti
...was not without its complications. Soon after independence it would be split into two: Henri Christophe’s kingdom in the North, and Alexandre Pétion’s republic in the South. The north was...
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?
...old white men like Whitman who said blacks were stupid, shouldn’t be allowed to vote, and didn’t have a place in the future of America.” The performance of “Song of...
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
...early twentieth centuries southern blacks were exposed to truly incredibly levels of lethal violence, both at the hands of white mobs and within the white criminal justice system. Tolnay and...
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
...Reconstruction transformed the lives of southern blacks in ways unmeasurable by statistics and in areas unreachable by law. It raised blacks’ expectations and aspirations, redefined their status in relation to...