One Day in Texas, Two Different Responses to Our Confederate Legacy As Austin honored a former slave, Panola County celebrated the Confederacy and ignored his brother. Photo: Milton M. Holland, a former slave and recipient of the Medal of Honor from Panola County, is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. (Photo by R.G. Ratcliffe) (Texas Monthly) [...]
The Remarkable Rise of One of Texas’s Most Accomplished Families How an African American family achieved extraordinary prominence in San Antonio during the height of Jim Crow–era segregation. Photo: Sutton family photo taken in 1917, with Lillian and Samuel seated in the center. (Courtesy of UTSA Special Collections) (Texas Monthly) For much of San Antonio’s [...]
Slavery and the American University Photo: Henry Martin, born into slavery at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello estate, began working at the University of Virginia in 1850 as a waiter and then a janitor; pictured here on the UVA lawn, 1896. (University of Virginia) (The New York Review of Books) According to the surviving records, the [...]
National Memorial to Honor Lynching Victims Opens April 26 (DiversityInc) There was a time in the U.S. when white people would gather in public squares in the Deep South to witness Black men, women or children hanged, burned or amputated, sometimes all of the above. This form of domestic terrorism is a painful part [...]
Textbook Racism How scholars sustained white supremacy Image: A drawing by Hanson Booth in "The Development of America," by Fremont P. Wirth (American Book Company, 1937). The caption reads in part: “Slaves at home, after the day’s work was over. Negroes always have been fond of singing and dancing.” (The Chronicle of Higher Education) There it sat [...]
Why People Rioted After Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Assassination Photo: Onlookers watch as a Chicago storefront building burns during riots in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr's assassination, 1968. (Credit: Lee Balterman/The Life Picture Collection/Getty Images) (History.com) Every night in November 1968, National Guardsmen circled the streets in Wilmington, Delaware, armed with loaded [...]
TEACHING THE HARD HISTORY OF AMERICAN SLAVERY Schools are not adequately teaching the history of American slavery. Educators are not sufficiently prepared to teach it. Textbooks do not have enough material about it. (Southern Poverty Law Center) American enslavement of Africans shaped our country's sociopolitical institutions and formed the cornerstone of our industrial revolution. [...]
'Black 14' Tells Story of College Football Players Who Risked Their Careers for Racial Justice Colorlines talks to Darius Clark Monroe about his new short documentary, which chronicles the 1969 saga of Black University of Wyoming football players who protested against racism in the Mormon Church. Photo: A mural by Adrienne Vetter depicts the members [...]
How One Amateur Historian Brought Us the Stories of African-Americans Who Knew Abraham Lincoln Once John E. Washington started to dig, he found an incredible wealth of untapped knowledge about the 16th president Photo: Abraham Lincoln entering Richmond, Va., Apr. 3, 1865 (Smithsonian.com) The memoir of Elizabeth Keckly, a formerly enslaved woman who became [...]
African-American women breaking barriers in the military "It's important to find your voice" (KRBC, Abilene) Over the last decade, women serving in leadership roles has become more common and that includes in our nation's military. KRBC works to continue to highlight those who make a difference every day and put their lives on the line [...]
