East Austin plaque unveiled to remember lynching victims The Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative plans to install similar plaques in other communities that had lynchings between the Reconstruction period and 1950. (Austin American-Statesman) The details of the Travis County lynching in 1894, based on news accounts from the time, are discouragingly sparse. Even [...]
Prairie View pianist got his start in a small Texas town Danny Kelley (Houston Chronicle) Driving to Cameron a couple of weeks ago, the little town southeast of Waco that had the audacity - with native-son Drayton McLane's encouragement - to make a bid for Amazon's second headquarters, I was mulling over [...]
African-American Cultural Heritage Action Fund The A.G. Gaston Motel in Birmingham was built as a place of luxury for minorities during the days of segregation, and stood at the center of several significant chapters of the Civil Rights movement. (City of Birmingham Archives) We owe it to ourselves, our ancestors, and our [...]
A town of freed slaves - on Robert E. Lee’s old estate - was destroyed to make Arlington cemetery Freedman’s Village was a haven for so-called ‘contraband’ people The houses at Freedman’s Village. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images) (Timeline.com) Sojourner Truth was outraged, but her feelings didn’t show in a letter she wrote about [...]
Preserving a piece of black history in Montopolis At center of a debate: A former school for Negro children (Austin Monthly) On a sweltering summer morning, Fred McGhee surveys an old schoolhouse in the middle of a meadow along Montopolis Drive. The paint is peeling, and overgrown vegetation makes the place hard to see from [...]
In August 1917, members of the all black Twenty-Fourth infantry stationed at Camp Logan armed themselves and marched toward the city of Houston. Students of history know how the story ended: court-martials, executions and dishonorable discharges. However, little attention is given to how the story began. Texas was, and still is, a southern state. That [...]
How Prairie View A&M lured a former Ivy League president out of retirement Prairie View A&M University interim President Ruth J. Simmons, the sole finalist for permanent president, interviewed on October 25, 2017. (Marjorie Kamys Cotera for The Texas Tribune) Ruth Simmons, a pioneering college administrator and the first black president of an [...]
There Are More Black Catholics in the U.S. Than Members of the A.M.E. Church How black Americans defy religious stereotypes - and navigate race relations in historically white, European spaces. Father Joseph Eckert baptizes a convert class at St. Elizabeth Catholic Church, the oldest African American institution in the archdiocese of Chicago, around [...]
One hundred years ago, President Woodrow Wilson made the fateful decision to enter the U.S. into the Great War. The decision to “defend democracy” changed this country, and the world, forever. Even though the racist epic “Birth of Nation” enjoyed rave reviews, even from the White House, and publicly revived the Ku Klux Klan, blacks [...]
‘Insulting African American Gold Star widows has a history’ Gold Star mothers and widows visiting the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Paris in 1930. (Courtesy National Archives via Journal of American History) (The Washington Post) For 11 years, Bessie Strawther longed for a chance to visit her son’s grave. Pvt. Henry Strawther, [...]
