The sugar that saturates the American diet has a barbaric history as the ‘white gold’ that fueled slavery. Photo: Children on a Louisiana sugar-cane plantation around 1885. (Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library) (The New York Times) Sugar has been linked in the United States to diabetes, obesity and [...]
Essay Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true. Image: Artwork by Adam Pendleton (The New York Times Magazine) In August 1619, just 12 years after the English settled Jamestown, Va., one year before the Puritans landed at Plymouth Rock and some 157 years [...]
In June 1944, Allied forces began their assault not only on the beaches of Normandy, but on Nazism itself. Dubbed Operation Overlord, the amphibious exercise is legendary as the extraction of France from German control and the beginning of the end of Adolph Hitler’s plans for a thousand year reign of his Aryan master race. [...]
How Texas Prevented Black Women From Voting Decades After The 19th Amendment Texas ratified the 19th Amendment on June 28, 1919, then shut out black voters by creating the “white primary.” (Image credit: Michelle Lam/Houston Public Media) (Houston Public Media) In 1918, when she was 25 years old, Christia Adair went door-to-door organizing for [...]
Retracing Slavery’s Trail of Tears America’s forgotten migration – the journeys of a million African-Americans from the tobacco South to the cotton South Image: A coffle of slaves being marched from Virginia west into Tennessee, c. 1850. (Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Williamsburg, Virginia) (Smithsonian) The Slave Trail of Tears [...]
In 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote The Souls of Black Folk in which he claimed: "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line." That was 1903. American society is in the last year of the second decade of the twenty-first century, and I wonder if that famous quote still applies. In [...]
A Denver sculptor was the first black man trained as an astronaut ahead of Apollo 11, but he never made it to space Photo: Ed Dwight, Jr. poses for a portrait in his workspace at his studio in Denver. (Kelsey Brunner, The Denver Post) A new PBS mini-series profiles Ed Dwight Jr. and other [...]
While NASA Was Landing on the Moon, Many African-Americans Sought Economic Justice Instead For those living in poverty, the billions spent on the Apollo program, no matter how inspiring the mission, laid bare the nation’s priorities Photo: Reverend Ralph Abernathy, flanked by associates, stand on steps of a mockup of the lunar module displaying [...]
The Tyler Rose: The Story of UT’s Recruitment of Earl Campbell (Alcalde) In 1973, Darrell K Royal faced challenges landing top African-American high school football players, so he enlisted a team of recruiters. Led by Ken Dabbs, they set out to convince the state’s top running back, Tyler’s Earl Campbell, that The University of [...]
I wonder Is there anybody here who late at midnight sheds briny tears all because you didn't have no one to help you along the way and oh Lord? And if there's anyone Lord Let me tell you, let me tell you what I've done I've achieved to be a fence around me but take [...]
