black history essay

How to Tell 400 Years of Black History in One Book

From 1619 to 2019, this collection of essays, edited by two of the nation’s preeminent scholars, shows the depth and breadth of African American history

History Correspondent

In August of 1619, the English warship White Lion sailed into Hampton Roads, Virginia, where the conjunction of the James, Elizabeth and York rivers meet the Atlantic Ocean. The White Lion ’s captain and crew were privateers, and they had taken captives from a Dutch slave ship. They exchanged, for supplies, more than 20 African people with the leadership and settlers at the Jamestown colony. In 2019 this event, while not the first arrival of Africans or the first incidence of slavery in North America , was widely recognized as inaugurating race-based slavery in the British colonies that would become the United States.

That 400th anniversary is the occasion for a unique collaboration: Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019 , edited by historians Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain. Kendi and Blain brought together 90 black writers—historians, scholars of other fields, journalists, activists and poets—to cover the full sweep and extraordinary diversity of those 400 years of black history. Although its scope is encyclopedic, the book is anything but a dry, dispassionate march through history. It’s elegantly structured in ten 40-year sections composed of eight essays (each covering one theme in a five-year period) and a poem punctuating the section conclusion; Kendi calls Four Hundred Souls “a chorus.”

The book opens with an essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones, the journalist behind the New York Times ’ 1619 Project , on the years 1619-1624, and closes with an entry from Black Lives Matter co-creator Alicia Garza writing about 2014-19, when the movement rose to the forefront of American politics. The depth and breadth of the material astounds, between fresh voices, such as historisn Mary Hicks writing about the Middle Passage for 1694-1699, and internationally renowned scholars, such as Annette Gordon-Reed writing about Sally Hemings for 1789-94. Prominent journalists include, in addition to Hannah-Jones, The Atlantic ’s Adam Serwer on Frederick Douglass (1859-64) and New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie on the Civil War (1864-69). The powerful poems resonate sharply with the essays, Chet’la Sebree’s verses in “And the Record Repeats” about the experiences of young black women, for example, and Salamishah M. Tillet’s account of Anita Hill’s testimony in the Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

“We are,” Kendi writes in the introduction collectively of black Americans, “reconstructing ourselves in this book.” The book itself, Blain writes in the conclusion, is “a testament to how much we have overcome, and how we have managed to do it together, despite our differences and diverse perspectives.” In an interview, Blain talked about how the project and the book’s distinctive structure developed, and how the editors imagine it will fit into the canon of black history and thought. A condensed and edited version of her conversation with Smithsonian is below.

Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019

Four Hundred Souls is a unique one-volume “community” history of African Americans. The editors, Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain, have assembled 90 brilliant writers, each of whom takes on a five-year period of that four-hundred-year span.

How did the Four Hundred Souls book come about?

We started working on the project in 2018 (it actually predates the [publication of] the New York Times 1619 Project.) Ibram reached out to me with the idea that with the 400th year anniversary of the first captive Africans arriving in Jamestown, maybe we should collaborate on a project that would commemorate this particular moment in history, and look at 400 years of African American history by pulling together a diverse set of voices.

The idea was that we'd be able to create something very different than any other book on black history. And as historians, we were thinking, what would historians of the future want? Who are the voices they would want to hear from? We wanted to create something that would actually function as a primary source in another, who knows, 40 years or so—that captures the voices of black writers and thinkers from a wide array of fields, reflecting on both the past but also the present too.

Did you have any models for how you pulled all these voices together?

There are a couple of models in the sense of the most significant, pioneering books in African American history. We thought immediately of W.E.B. De Bois' Black Reconstruction in America in terms of the scope of the work, the depth of the content, and the richness of the ideas. Robin D.G. Kelley's Freedom Dreams is another model, but more recent. Martha Jones' Vanguard , is a book that captures decades right of black women's political activism and the struggle for the vote in a way that I think, does a similar kind of broad, sweeping history. Daina Ramey Berry and Kali N. Gross's Black Woman's History of the United States is another.

But ours was not a single authored book or even an edited collection of just historians. We didn't want to produce a textbook, or an encyclopedia. We wanted this work to be, as an edited volume, rich enough and big enough to cover 400 years of history in a way that would keep the reader engaged from start to finish, 1619 to 2019. That’s part of the importance of the multiple different genres and different voices we included moving from period to period.

How does Four Hundred Souls reflect the concept of a community history?

We figured that community would show up in different ways in the narrative, but we were really thinking initially, how do we recreate community in putting this book together? One of the earliest analogies that Ibram used was describing this as a choir. I love this—he described the poets as soloists. And then in this choir, you'd have sopranos, you'd have tenors, and you’d have altos. And so the question was: Who do we invite to be in this volume that would capture collectively that spirit of community?

We recognized that we could never fully represent every single field and every single background, but we tried as much as possible. And so even in putting together the book, there was a moment where we said, for example, "Wait a minute, we don't really have a scholar here who would be able to truly grapple with the sort of interconnection between African American History and Native American history." So we thought, is there a scholar, who identifies as African American and Native American and then we reached out to [UCLA historian] Kyle Mays .

So there were moments where we just had to be intentional about making sure that we were having voices that represented as much as possible the diversity of black America. We invited Esther Armah to write about the black immigrant experience because what is black America without immigrants? The heart of black America is that it's not homogenous at all—it's diverse. And we tried to capture that.

We also wanted to make sure that a significant number of the writers were women, largely because we acknowledge that so many of the histories that we teach, that we read, and that so many people cite are written by men. There's still a general tendency to look for male expertise, to acknowledge men as experts, especially in the field of history. Women are often sidelined in these conversations . So we were intentional about that, too, and including someone like Alicia Garza, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, we wanted to acknowledge the crucial role that black women are playing in shaping American politics to this very day.

How did historians approach their subjects differently than say, creative writers?

One of the challenges with the book, which turned out to be also an opportunity, was that we were focusing on key historical moments, figures, themes and places in the United States, each within in a very specific five-year period. We actually spent a lot of time mapping out instructions for authors. It wasn't just: “Write a piece for us on this topic.” We said, “Here's what we want and what we don't want. Here's what we expect of you ask these questions as you're writing the essay, make sure you're grappling with these particular themes.”

But they also had to have a bit of freedom, to look backward, and also to look forward. And I think the structure with a bit of freedom worked, it was a pretty nice balance. Some essays the five years just fit like a glove, others a little less so but the writers managed to pull it off.

We also spent a lot of time planning and carefully identifying who would write on certain topics. “Cotton,” which memoirist Kiese Laymon wrote about for 1804-1809, is a perfect example. We realized very early that if we asked a historian to write about cotton, they would be very frustrated with the five-year constraint. But when we asked Kiese, we let him know that we would provide him with books on cotton and slavery for him to take a look at. And then he brought to it his own personal experience, which turned out to be such a powerful narrative. He writes, “When the land is freed, so will be all the cotton and all the money made off the suffering that white folks made cotton bring to Black folks in Mississippi and the entire South.”

And so that's the other element of this too. Even a lot of people wondered how we would have a work of history with so many non-historians. We gave them clear guidance and materials, and they brought incredible talent to the project.

The New York Times ’ 1619 project shares a similar point of origin, the 400th anniversary of the arrival of enslaved Africans to colonial America. What did you make of it when it came out last year?

When the 1619 Project came out, [Ibram and I] were thrilled, because actually, it, in so many ways, complemented our vision for our project. Then we decided we really had to invite Nikole Hannah-Jones to contribute. We weren't sure who we would ask for that first essay, but then we were like, "You know what? This makes sense."

I know there are so many different critiques, but for me, what is most valuable about the project is the way that it demonstrates how much, from the very beginning, the ideas and experiences of black people have been sidelined.

This is why we wanted her to write her essay [about the slave ship White Lion .] Even as someone who studied U.S. history, I did not even know about the White Lion for many years. I mean, that's how sad it is…but I could talk about the Mayflower . That was part of the history that I was taught. And so what does that tell us?

We don't talk about 1619 the way that we do 1620. And why is that? Well, let's get to the heart of the matter. Race matters and racism, too, in the way that we even tell our histories. And so we wanted to send that message. And like I said, to have a complementary spirit and vision as the 1619 Project.

When readers have finished going through 400 Souls , where else can they read black scholars writing on black history?

One of the things that the African American Intellectual History Society [Blain is currently president of the organization] is committed to doing is elevating the scholarship and writing of Black scholars as well as a diverse group of scholars who work in the field of Black history, and specifically Black intellectual history.

Black Perspectives [an AAIHS publication] has a broad readership, certainly, we're reaching academics in the fields of history and many other fields. At the same time, a significant percentage of our readers are non-academics. We have activists who read the blog, well known intellectuals and thinkers, and just everyday lay people who are interested in history, who want to learn more about black history and find the content accessible.

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Karin Wulf | | READ MORE

Karin Wulf is the director of the John Carter Brown Library and a historian at Brown University. She was previously the executive director of the Omohundro Institute of American History & Culture and a professor of history at William & Mary.

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Knowing the Past Opens the Door to the Future: The Continuing Importance of Black History Month

No one has played a greater role in helping all Americans know the black past than Carter G. Woodson, the individual who created Negro History Week in Washington, D.C., in February 1926. Woodson was the second black American to receive a PhD in history from Harvard—following W.E.B. Du Bois by a few years. To Woodson, the black experience was too important simply to be left to a small group of academics. Woodson believed that his role was to use black history and culture as a weapon in the struggle for racial uplift. By 1916, Woodson had moved to DC and established the “Association for the Study of Negro Life and Culture,” an organization whose goal was to make black history accessible to a wider audience. Woodson was a strange and driven man whose only passion was history, and he expected everyone to share his passion.

Dr. Carter G. Woodson, late 1940s

This impatience led Woodson to create Negro History Week in 1926, to ensure that school children be exposed to black history. Woodson chose the second week of February in order to celebrate the birthday of Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. It is important to realize that Negro History Week was not born in a vacuum. The 1920s saw the rise in interest in African American culture that was represented by the Harlem Renaissance where writers like Langston Hughes, Georgia Douglass Johnson, Claude McKay—wrote about the joys and sorrows of blackness, and musicians like Louie Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Jimmy Lunceford captured the new rhythms of the cities created in part by the thousands of southern blacks who migrated to urban centers like Chicago. And artists like Aaron Douglass, Richmond Barthé, and Lois Jones created images that celebrated blackness and provided more positive images of the African American experience.

Woodson hoped to build upon this creativity and further stimulate interest through Negro History Week. Woodson had two goals. One was to use history to prove to white America that blacks had played important roles in the creation of America and thereby deserve to be treated equally as citizens. In essence, Woodson—by celebrating heroic black figures—be they inventors, entertainers, or soldiers—hoped to prove our worth, and by proving our worth—he believed that equality would soon follow. His other goal was to increase the visibility of black life and history, at a time when few newspapers, books, and universities took notice of the black community, except to dwell upon the negative. Ultimately Woodson believed Negro History Week—which became Black History Month in 1976—would be a vehicle for racial transformation forever.

The question that faces us today is whether or not Black History Month is still relevant? Is it still a vehicle for change? Or has it simply become one more school assignment that has limited meaning for children. Has Black History Month become a time when television and the media stack their black material? Or is it a useful concept whose goals have been achieved? After all, few—except the most ardent rednecks - could deny the presence and importance of African Americans to American society or as my then-14 year old daughter Sarah put it, “I see Colin Powell everyday on TV, all my friends—black and white—are immersed in black culture through music and television. And America has changed dramatically since 1926—Is not it time to retire Black History Month as we have eliminated white and colored signs on drinking fountains?” I will spare you the three hour lesson I gave her.

I would like to suggest that despite the profound change in race relations that has occurred in our lives, Carter G. Woodson’s vision for black history as a means of transformation and change is still quite relevant and quite useful. African American history month, with a bit of tweaking, is still a beacon of change and hope that is still surely needed in this world. The chains of slavery are gone—but we are all not yet free. The great diversity within the black community needs the glue of the African American past to remind us of not just how far we have traveled but lo, how far there is to go.

While there are many reasons and examples that I could point towards, let me raise five concerns or challenges that African Americans — in fact — all Americans — face that black history can help address:

The Challenge of Forgetting

You can tell a great deal about a country and a people by what they deem important enough to remember, to create moments for — what they put in their museum and what they celebrate. In Scandinavia — there are monuments to the Vikings as a symbol of freedom and the spirit of exploration. In Germany during the 1930s and 1940s, the Nazis celebrated their supposed Aryan supremacy through monument and song. While America traditionally revels in either Civil War battles or founding fathers. Yet I would suggest that we learn even more about a country by what it chooses to forget — its mistakes, its disappointments, and its embarrassments. In some ways, African American History month is a clarion call to remember. Yet it is a call that is often unheeded.

Let’s take the example of one of the great unmentionable in American history — slavery. For nearly 250 years slavery not only existed but it was one of the dominant forces in American life. Political clout and economic fortune depended on the labor of slaves. And the presence of this peculiar institution generated an array of books, publications, and stories that demonstrate how deeply it touched America. And while we can discuss basic information such as the fact that in 1860 — 4 million blacks were enslaved, and that a prime field hand cost $1,000, while a female, with her childbearing capability, brought $1,500, we find few moments to discuss the impact, legacy, and contemporary meaning of slavery.

In 1988, the Smithsonian Institution, about to open an exhibition that included slavery, decided to survey 10,000 Americans. The results were fascinating — 92% of white respondents felt slavery had little meaning to them — these respondents often said “my family did not arrive until after the end of slavery.” Even more disturbing was the fact that 79% of African Americans expressed no interest or some embarrassment about slavery. It is my hope that with greater focus and collaboration Black History Month can stimulate discussion about a subject that both divides and embarrasses.

As a historian, I have always felt that slavery is an African American success story because we found ways to survive, to preserve our culture and our families. Slavery is also ripe with heroes, such as slaves who ran away or rebelled, like Harriet Tubman or Denmark Vessey, but equally important are the forgotten slave fathers and mothers who raised families and kept a people alive. I am not embarrassed by my slave ancestors; I am in awe of their strength and their humanity. I would love to see the African American community rethink its connection to our slave past. I also think of something told to me by a Mr. Johnson, who was a former sharecropper I interviewed in Georgetown, SC:

Though the slaves were bought, they were also brave. Though they were sold, they were also strong.

The Challenge of Preserving a People’s Culture

While the African American community is no longer invisible, I am unsure that as a community we are taking the appropriate steps to ensure the preservation of African American cultural patrimony in appropriate institutions. Whether we like it or not, museums, archives, and libraries not only preserves culture they legitimize it. Therefore, it is incumbent of African Americans to work with cultural institutions to preserve their family photography, documents, and objects. While African Americans have few traditions of giving material to museums, it is crucial that more of the black past make it into American cultural repositories.

A good example is the Smithsonian, when the National Museum of American History wanted to mount an exhibition on slavery, it found it did not have any objects that described slavery. That is partially a response to a lack of giving by the African American Community. This lack of involvement also affects the preservation of black historic sites. Though there has been more attention paid to these sites, too much of our history has been paved over, gone through urban renewal, gentrified, or unidentified, or un-acknowledged. Hopefully a renewed Black History Month can focus attention on the importance of preserving African American culture.

There is no more powerful force than a people steeped in their history. And there is no higher cause than honoring our struggle and ancestors by remembering.

The Challenge of Maintaining a Community

As the African American Community diversifies and splinters, it is crucial to find mechanisms and opportunities to maintain our sense of community. As some families lose the connection with their southern roots, it is imperative that we understand our common heritage and history. The communal nature of black life has provided substance, guidance, and comfort for generations. And though our communities are quite diverse, it is our common heritage that continues to hold us together.

The Power of Inspiration

One thing has not changed. That is the need to draw inspiration and guidance from the past. And through that inspiration, people will find tools and paths that will help them live their lives. Who could not help but be inspired by Martin Luther King’s oratory, commitment to racial justice, and his ultimate sacrifice. Or by the arguments of William and Ellen Craft or Henry “Box” Brown who used great guile to escape from slavery. Who could not draw substance from the creativity of Madame CJ Walker or the audacity and courage of prize fighter Jack Johnson. Or who could not continue to struggle after listening to the mother of Emmitt Till share her story of sadness and perseverance. I know that when life is tough, I take solace in the poetry of Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Nikki Giovanni, or Gwendolyn Brooks. And I find comfort in the rhythms of Louie Armstrong, Sam Cooke or Dinah Washington. And I draw inspiration from the anonymous slave who persevered so that the culture could continue.

Let me conclude by re-emphasizing that Black History Month continues to serve us well. In part because Woodson’s creation is as much about today as it is about the past. Experiencing Black History Month every year reminds us that history is not dead or distant from our lives.

Rather, I see the African American past in the way my daughter’s laugh reminds me of my grandmother. I experience the African American past when I think of my grandfather choosing to leave the South rather than continue to experience share cropping and segregation. Or when I remember sitting in the back yard listening to old men tell stories. Ultimately, African American History — and its celebration throughout February — is just as vibrant today as it was when Woodson created it 85 years ago. Because it helps us to remember there is no more powerful force than a people steeped in their history. And there is no higher cause than honoring our struggle and ancestors by remembering.

Lonnie Bunch Founding Director

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Black History Month 2022

February is Black History Month in the U.S., and this year's theme is Black Health and Wellness. NPR has compiled a list of stories, music performances, podcasts and other content that chronicles the Black American experience.

Here's the story behind Black History Month — and why it's celebrated in February

Jonathan Franklin

At the March on Washington on Aug. 28, 1963, African Americans carry placards demanding equal rights, integrated schools, decent housing and an end to bias. Warren K Leffler/Universal History Archive/Getty Images hide caption

At the March on Washington on Aug. 28, 1963, African Americans carry placards demanding equal rights, integrated schools, decent housing and an end to bias.

Every February, the U.S. honors the contributions and sacrifices of African Americans who have helped shape the nation. Black History Month celebrates the rich cultural heritage, triumphs and adversities that are an indelible part of our country's history.

This year's theme, Black Health and Wellness , pays homage to medical scholars and health care providers. The theme is especially timely as we enter the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has disproportionately affected minority communities and placed unique burdens on Black health care professionals.

TED Radio Hour

Black history month playlist.

"There is no American history without African American history," said Sara Clarke Kaplan, executive director of the Antiracist Research & Policy Center at American University in Washington, D.C. The Black experience, she said, is embedded in "everything we think of as 'American history.' "

First, there was Negro History Week

Critics have long argued that Black history should be taught and celebrated year-round, not just during one month each year.

It was Carter G. Woodson , the "father of Black history," who first set out in 1926 to designate a time to promote and educate people about Black history and culture, according to W. Marvin Dulaney. He is a historian and the president of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History ( ASALH ).

Woodson envisioned a weeklong celebration to encourage the coordinated teaching of Black history in public schools. He designated the second week of February as Negro History Week and galvanized fellow historians through the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, which he founded in 1915. (ASNLH later became ASALH.)

The idea wasn't to place limitations but really to focus and broaden the nation's consciousness.

Carter G. Woodson (1875-1950) was an American historian, a scholar and the founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. Woodson was instrumental in launching Negro History Week in 1926. Bettmann Archive/Getty Images hide caption

"Woodson's goal from the very beginning was to make the celebration of Black history in the field of history a 'serious area of study,' " said Albert Broussard, a professor of Afro-American history at Texas A&M University.

The idea eventually grew in acceptance, and by the late 1960s, Negro History Week had evolved into what is now known as Black History Month. Protests around racial injustice, inequality and anti-imperialism that were occurring in many parts of the U.S. were pivotal to the change.

Colleges and universities also began to hold commemorations, with Kent State University being one of the first, according to Kaplan.

Fifty years after the first celebrations, President Gerald R. Ford officially recognized Black History Month during the country's 1976 bicentennial. Ford called upon Americans to "seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of Black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history," History.com reports .

Why February was chosen as Black History Month

February was chosen primarily because the second week of the month coincides with the birthdays of both Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. Lincoln was influential in the emancipation of slaves , and Douglass, a former slave, was a prominent leader in the abolitionist movement , which fought to end slavery.

Lincoln and Douglass were each born in the second week of February, so it was traditionally a time when African Americans would hold celebrations in honor of emancipation, Kaplan said. (Douglass' exact date of birth wasn't recorded, but he came to celebrate it on Feb. 14.)

Thus, Woodson created Negro History Week around the two birthdays as a way of "commemorating the black past," according to ASALH .

Forty years after Ford formally recognized Black History Month, it was Barack Obama, the nation's first Black president, who delivered a message of his own from the White House, a place built by slaves.

President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama host the annual reception for Black History Month at the White House on Feb. 18, 2016. Mike Theiler/Pool/Getty Images hide caption

"Black History Month shouldn't be treated as though it is somehow separate from our collective American history or somehow just boiled down to a compilation of greatest hits from the March on Washington or from some of our sports heroes," Obama said.

"It's about the lived, shared experience of all African Americans, high and low, famous and obscure, and how those experiences have shaped and challenged and ultimately strengthened America," he continued.

(Canada also commemorates Black History Month in February, while the U.K. and Ireland celebrate it in October.)

There's a new theme every year

ASALH designates a new theme for Black History Month each year, in keeping with the practice Woodson established for Negro History Week.

This year's Black Health and Wellness theme is particularly appropriate, Dulaney said, as the U.S. continues to fight the coronavirus pandemic.

"As [Black people], we have terrible health outcomes, and even the coronavirus has been affecting us disproportionately in terms of those of us who are catching it," Dulaney said.

Shots - Health News

More black and latinx americans are embracing covid-19 vaccination.

"There's never been a time where Black people and others should not celebrate Black history," Broussard said. "Given the current racial climate, the racial reckoning that began in wake of George Floyd's murder ... this is an opportunity to learn."

NPR has compiled a list of stories, performances and other content that chronicles the Black American experience for Black History Month. See the whole collection here.

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Black History Milestones: Timeline

By: History.com Editors

Updated: January 24, 2024 | Original: October 14, 2009

Black history in the United States is a rich and varied chronicle of slavery and liberty, oppression and progress, segregation and achievement. Though captive and free Africans were likely present in the Americas by the 1400s, the kidnapped men, women and children from Africa who were sold first to European colonists in 1619, and later to American citizens, became symbolic of the early years of Black history in the United States.

The fate of enslaved people in the United States divided the nation during the Civil War . And after the war, the racist legacy of slavery persisted, spurring movements of resistance, including the Underground Railroad , the Montgomery Bus Boycott , the Selma to Montgomery March , and, later, the Black Lives Matter movement . Through it all, Black leaders, artists and writers have emerged to shape the character and identity of a nation.

Slavery Comes to North America, 1619

To satisfy the labor needs of the rapidly growing North American colonies, white European settlers turned in the early 17th century from indentured servants (mostly poorer Europeans) to a cheaper, more plentiful labor source: enslaved Africans. After 1619, when a Dutch ship brought 20 Africans ashore at the British colony of Jamestown, Virginia , slavery spread quickly through the American colonies. Though it is impossible to give accurate figures, some historians have estimated that 6 to 7 million enslaved people were imported to the New World during the 18th century alone, depriving the African continent of its most valuable resource—its healthiest and ablest men and women.

After the American Revolution , many colonists (particularly in the North, where slavery was relatively unimportant to the economy) began to link the oppression of enslaved Africans to their own oppression by the British. Though leaders such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson —both slaveholders from Virginia—took cautious steps towards limiting slavery in the newly independent nation, the Constitution tacitly acknowledged the institution, guaranteeing the right to repossess any “person held to service or labor” (an obvious euphemism for slavery). 

Many northern states had abolished slavery by the end of the 18th century, but the institution was absolutely vital to the South, where Black people constituted a large minority of the population and the economy relied on the production of crops like tobacco and cotton. Congress outlawed the import of new enslaved people in 1808, but the enslaved population in the U.S. nearly tripled over the next 50 years, and by 1860 it had reached nearly 4 million, with more than half living in the cotton–producing states of the South.

Rise of the Cotton Industry, 1793

In the years immediately following the Revolutionary War , the rural South—the region where slavery had taken the strongest hold in North America—faced an economic crisis. The soil used to grow tobacco, then the leading cash crop, was exhausted, while products such as rice and indigo failed to generate much profit. As a result, the price of enslaved people was dropping, and the continued growth of slavery seemed in doubt. 

Around the same time, the mechanization of spinning and weaving had revolutionized the textile industry in England, and the demand for American cotton soon became insatiable. Production was limited, however, by the laborious process of removing the seeds from raw cotton fibers, which had to be completed by hand. 

In 1793, a young Yankee schoolteacher named Eli Whitney came up with a solution to the problem: The cotton gin, a simple mechanized device that efficiently removed the seeds, could be hand–powered or, on a large scale, harnessed to a horse or powered by water. The cotton gin was widely copied, and within a few years the South would transition from a dependence on the cultivation of tobacco to that of cotton. 

As the growth of the cotton industry led inexorably to an increased demand for enslaved Africans, the prospect of slave rebellion—such as the one that triumphed in Haiti in 1791—drove slaveholders to make increased efforts to prevent a similar event from happening in the South. Also in 1793, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act , which made it a federal crime to assist an enslaved person trying to escape. Though it was difficult to enforce from state to state, especially with the growth of abolitionist feeling in the North, the law helped enshrine and legitimize slavery as an enduring American institution.

Nat Turner’s Revolt, August 1831

In August 1831, Nat Turner struck fear into the hearts of white Southerners by leading the only effective slave rebellion in U.S. history. Born on a small plantation in Southampton County, Virginia, Turner inherited a passionate hatred of slavery from his African–born mother and came to see himself as anointed by God to lead his people out of bondage. 

In early 1831, Turner took a solar eclipse as a sign that the time for revolution was near, and on the night of August 21, he and a small band of followers killed his owners, the Travis family, and set off toward the town of Jerusalem , where they planned to capture an armory and gather more recruits. The group, which eventually numbered around 75 Black people, killed some 60 white people in two days before armed resistance from local white people and the arrival of state militia forces overwhelmed them just outside Jerusalem. Some 100 enslaved people, including innocent bystanders, lost their lives in the struggle. Turner escaped and spent six weeks on the run before he was captured, tried and hanged.

Oft–exaggerated reports of the insurrection—some said that hundreds of white people had been killed—sparked a wave of anxiety across the South. Several states called special emergency sessions of the legislature, and most strengthened their codes in order to limit the education, movement and assembly of enslaved people. While supporters of slavery pointed to the Turner rebellion as evidence that Black people were inherently inferior barbarians requiring an institution such as slavery to discipline them, the increased repression of southern Black people would strengthen anti–slavery feeling in the North through the 1860s and intensify the regional tensions building toward civil war.

Abolitionism and the Underground Railroad, 1831

The early abolition movement in North America was fueled both by enslaved people's efforts to liberate themselves and by groups of white settlers, such as the Quakers , who opposed slavery on religious or moral grounds. Though the lofty ideals of the Revolutionary era invigorated the movement, by the late 1780s it was in decline, as the growing southern cotton industry made slavery an ever more vital part of the national economy. In the early 19th century, however, a new brand of radical abolitionism emerged in the North, partly in reaction to Congress’ passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 and the tightening of codes in most southern states. One of its most eloquent voices was William Lloyd Garrison, a crusading journalist from Massachusetts , who founded the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator in 1831 and became known as the most radical of America’s antislavery activists. 

Antislavery northerners—many of them free Black people—had begun helping enslaved people escape from southern plantations to the North via a loose network of safe houses as early as the 1780s called the Underground Railroad. 

Dred Scott Case, March 6, 1857

On March 6, 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Scott v. Sanford, delivering a resounding victory to southern supporters of slavery and arousing the ire of northern abolitionists. During the 1830s, the owner of an enslaved man named Dred Scott had taken him from the slave state of Missouri to the Wisconsin territory and Illinois , where slavery was outlawed, according to the terms of the Missouri Compromise of 1820. 

Upon his return to Missouri, Scott sued for his freedom on the basis that his temporary removal to free soil had made him legally free. The case went to the Supreme Court, where Chief Justice Roger B. Taney and the majority eventually ruled that Scott was an enslaved person and not a citizen, and thus had no legal rights to sue. 

According to the Court, Congress had no constitutional power to deprive persons of their property rights when dealing with enslaved people in the territories. The verdict effectively declared the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional, ruling that all territories were open to slavery and could exclude it only when they became states. 

While much of the South rejoiced, seeing the verdict as a clear victory, antislavery northerners were furious. One of the most prominent abolitionists, Frederick Douglass , was cautiously optimistic, however, wisely predicting that—"This very attempt to blot out forever the hopes of an enslaved people may be one necessary link in the chain of events preparatory to the complete overthrow of the whole slave system.”

John Brown's Raid, October 16, 1859

A native of Connecticut , John Brown struggled to support his large family and moved restlessly from state to state throughout his life, becoming a passionate opponent of slavery along the way. After assisting in the Underground Railroad out of Missouri and engaging in the bloody struggle between pro- and anti-slavery forces in Kansas in the 1850s, Brown grew anxious to strike a more extreme blow for the cause. 

On the night of October 16, 1859, he led a small band of less than 50 men in a raid against the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. Their aim was to capture enough ammunition to lead a large operation against Virginia’s slaveholders. Brown’s men, including several Black people, captured and held the arsenal until federal and state governments sent troops and were able to overpower them.

John Brown was hanged on December 2, 1859. His trial riveted the nation, and he emerged as an eloquent voice against the injustice of slavery and a martyr to the abolitionist cause. Just as Brown’s courage turned thousands of previously indifferent northerners against slavery, his violent actions convinced slave owners in the South beyond doubt that abolitionists would go to any lengths to destroy the "peculiar institution.” Rumors spread of other planned insurrections, and the South reverted to a semi-war status. Only the election of the anti–slavery Republican Abraham Lincoln as president in 1860 remained before the southern states would begin severing ties with the Union, sparking the bloodiest conflict in American history.

Civil War and Emancipation, 1861

In the spring of 1861, the bitter sectional conflicts that had been intensifying between North and South over the course of four decades erupted into civil war, with 11 southern states seceding from the Union and forming the Confederate States of America . Though President Abraham Lincoln ’s antislavery views were well established, and his election as the nation’s first Republican president had been the catalyst that pushed the first southern states to secede in late 1860, the Civil War at its outset was not a war to abolish slavery. Lincoln sought first and foremost to preserve the Union, and he knew that few people even in the North—let alone the border slave states still loyal to Washington—would have supported a war against slavery in 1861.

By the summer of 1862, however, Lincoln had come to believe he could not avoid the slavery question much longer. Five days after the bloody Union victory at Antietam in September, he issued a preliminary emancipation proclamation; on January 1, 1863, he made it official that enslaved people within any State, or designated part of a State in rebellion, “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.” Lincoln justified his decision as a wartime measure, and as such he did not go so far as to free enslaved people in the border states loyal to the Union, an omission that angered many abolitionists.

By freeing some 3 million enslaved people in the rebel states, the Emancipation Proclamation deprived the Confederacy of the bulk of its labor forces and put international public opinion strongly on the Union side. Some 186,000 Black soldiers would join the Union Army by the time the war ended in 1865, and 38,000 lost their lives. The total number of dead at war’s end was 620,000 (out of a population of some 35 million), making it the costliest conflict in American history.

The Post-Slavery South, 1865

Though the Union victory in the Civil War gave some 4 million enslaved people their freedom, significant challenges awaited during the Reconstruction period. The 13th Amendment , adopted late in 1865, officially abolished slavery, but the question of freed Black peoples’ status in the post–war South remained. As white southerners gradually reestablished civil authority in the former Confederate states in 1865 and 1866, they enacted a series of laws known as the Black Codes , which were designed to restrict freed Black peoples’ activity and ensure their availability as a labor force. 

Impatient with the leniency shown toward the former Confederate states by Andrew Johnson , who became president after Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865, so-called Radical Republicans in Congress overrode Johnson’s veto and passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867, which basically placed the South under martial law. The following year, the 14th Amendment broadened the definition of citizenship, granting "equal protection” of the Constitution to people who had been enslaved. Congress required southern states to ratify the 14th Amendment and enact universal male suffrage before they could rejoin the Union, and the state constitutions during those years were the most progressive in the region’s history.

The 15th Amendment , adopted in 1870, guaranteed that a citizen’s right to vote would not be denied—on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” During Reconstruction, Black Americans won election to southern state governments and even to the U.S. Congress. Their growing influence greatly dismayed many white southerners, who felt control slipping ever further away from them. The white protective societies that arose during this period—the largest of which was the Ku Klux Klan (KKK)—sought to disenfranchise Black voters by using voter suppression and intimidation as well as more extreme violence. By 1877, when the last federal soldiers left the South and Reconstruction drew to a close, Black Americans had seen dishearteningly little improvement in their economic and social status, and what political gains they had made had been wiped away by the vigorous efforts of white supremacist forces throughout the region.

'Separate But Equal,' 1896

As Reconstruction drew to a close and the forces of white supremacy regained control from carpetbaggers (northerners who moved South) and freed Black people, Southern state legislatures began enacting the first segregation laws, known as the “Jim Crow” laws . Taken from a much-copied minstrel routine written by a white actor who performed often in blackface , the name “Jim Crow” came to serve as a general derogatory term for African Americans in the post-Reconstruction South.

By 1885, most southern states had laws requiring separate schools for Black and white students, and by 1900, “persons of color” were required to be separated from white people in railroad cars and depots, hotels, theaters, restaurants, barber shops and other establishments. On May 18, 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its verdict in Plessy v. Ferguson , a case that represented the first major test of the meaning of the 14th Amendment’s provision of full and equal citizenship to African Americans.

By an 8–1 majority, the Court upheld a Louisiana law that required the segregation of passengers on railroad cars. By asserting that the equal protection clause was not violated as long as reasonably equal conditions were provided to both groups, the Court established the “separate but equal” doctrine that would thereafter be used for assessing the constitutionality of racial segregation laws. Plessy vs. Ferguson stood as the overriding judicial precedent in civil rights cases until 1954, when it was reversed by the Court’s verdict in Brown v. Board of Education .

Washington, Carver & Du Bois, 1900

As the 19th century came to an end and segregation took ever stronger hold in the South, many African Americans saw self-improvement, especially through education, as the single greatest opportunity to escape the indignities they suffered. Many Black people looked to Booker T. Washington , the author of the bestselling Up From Slavery (1900), as an inspiration. As president of Alabama’s Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, Washington urged Black Americans to acquire the kind of industrial or vocational training (such as farming, mechanics and domestic service) that would give them the necessary skills to carve out a niche for themselves in the U.S. economy. George Washington Carver , another formerly enslaved man and the head of Tuskegee’s agriculture department, helped liberate the South from its reliance on cotton by convincing farmers to plant peanuts, soybeans and sweet potatoes in order to rejuvenate the exhausted soil.

By 1940, peanuts had become the second cash crop in the South. Like Washington, Carver had little interest in racial politics, and was celebrated by many white Americans as a shining example of a modest, industrious Black man. While Washington and Carver represented a philosophy of accommodation to white supremacy, another prominent Black educator, the Harvard-trained historian and sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois, became a leading voice in the growing Black protest movement during the first half of the 20th century. In his 1903 book Souls of Black Folk , Du Bois spoke strongly against Washington’s advocacy of industrial education, which he saw as too narrow and economically focused, and stressed the importance of higher education for African Americans.

NAACP Founded, 1909

In June 1905, a group led by the prominent Black educator W.E.B. Du Bois met at Niagara Falls , Canada, sparking a new political protest movement to demand civil rights for Black people in the old spirit of abolitionism. As America’s exploding urban population faced shortages of employment and housing, violent hostility towards Black people had increased around the country; lynching, though illegal, was a widespread practice. A wave of race riots—particularly one in Springfield, Illinois in 1908—lent a sense of urgency to the Niagara Movement and its supporters, who in 1909 joined their agenda with that of a new permanent civil rights organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP ). Among the NAACP’s stated goals were the abolition of all forced segregation, the enforcement of the 14th and 15th Amendments, equal education for Black and white students and complete enfranchisement of all Black men. (Though proponents of female suffrage were part of the original NAACP, the issue was not mentioned.)

First established in Chicago , the NAACP had expanded to more than 400 locations by 1921. One of its earliest programs was a crusade against lynching and other lawless acts. Those efforts—including a nationwide protest of D.W. Griffiths’ silent film Birth of a Nation (1915), which glorified white supremacy and the Ku Klux Klan—would continue into the 1920s, playing a crucial role in drastically reducing the number of lynchings carried out in the United States.

Du Bois edited the NAACP’s official magazine, The Crisis , from 1910 to 1934, publishing many of the leading voices in African American literature and politics and helping fuel the spread of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s.

Marcus Garvey and the UNIA, 1916

Born in Jamaica, the Black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey founded his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) there in 1914; two years later, he brought it to the United States. Garvey appealed to the racial pride of African Americans, exalting blackness as strong and beautiful. As racial prejudice was so ingrained in white civilization, Garvey claimed, it was futile for Black people to appeal to white peoples’ sense of justice and democratic principles. Their only hope, according to him, was to flee America and return to Africa to build a country of their own. After an unsuccessful appeal to the League of Nations to settle a colony in Africa and failed negotiations with Liberia, Garvey announced the formation of the Empire of Africa in 1921, with himself as provisional president.

Other African American leaders, notably W.E.B. Du Bois of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), criticized Garvey and his “Back to Africa” movement; he was openly contemptuous of them in return. There was no denying the movement’s appeal, however. Garvey’s boast of 6 million followers in 1923 was probably exaggerated, but even his critics admitted that the UNIA had some 500,000 members. In 1923, the U.S. government successfully prosecuted and convicted Garvey for mail fraud in connection with selling stock in his Black Star Line shipping company. After serving a two-year jail sentence, Garvey was pardoned by President Calvin Coolidge and immediately deported; he died in London in 1940.

Harlem Renaissance, 1920

In the 1920s, the great migration of Black Americans from the rural South to the urban North sparked an African American cultural renaissance that took its name from the New York City neighborhood of Harlem but became a widespread movement in cities throughout the North and West. Also known as the Black Renaissance or the New Negro Movement, the Harlem Renaissance marked the first time that mainstream publishers and critics turned their attention seriously to African American literature, music, art and politics. Blues singer Bessie Smith, pianist Jelly Roll Morton, bandleader Louis Armstrong, composer Duke Ellington, dancer Josephine Baker and actor Paul Robeson were among the leading entertainment talents of the Harlem Renaissance, while Paul Laurence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston were some of its most eloquent writers.

There was a flip side to this greater exposure, however: Emerging Black writers relied heavily on white-owned publications and publishing houses, while in Harlem’s most famous cabaret, the Cotton Club, the preeminent Black entertainers of the day played to exclusively white audiences. In 1926, a controversial bestseller about Harlem life by the white novelist Carl von Vechten exemplified the attitude of many white urban sophisticates, who looked to Black culture as a window into a more “primitive” and “vital” way of life. W.E.B. Du Bois, for one, railed against Van Vechten’s novel and criticized works by Black writers, such as McKay’s novel Home to Harlem , that he saw as reinforcing negative stereotypes of Black people. With the onset of the Great Depression , as organizations like the NAACP and the National Urban League switched their focus to the economic and political problems facing Black Americans, the Harlem Renaissance drew to a close. Its influence had stretched around the world, opening the doors of mainstream culture to Black artists and writers.

African Americans in WWII, 1941

During World War II , many African Americans were ready to fight for what President Franklin D. Roosevelt called the “Four Freedoms”—freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear—even while they themselves lacked those freedoms at home. More than 3 million Black Americans would register for service during the war, with some 500,000 seeing action overseas. According to War Department policy, enlisted Black and white people were organized into separate units. Frustrated Black servicemen were forced to combat racism even as they sought to further U.S. war aims; this became known as the “Double V” strategy, for the two victories they sought to win.

The war’s first African American hero emerged from the attack on Pearl Harbor , when Dorie Miller, a young Navy steward on the U.S.S. West Virginia , carried wounded crew members to safety and manned a machine gun post, shooting down several Japanese planes. In the spring of 1943, graduates of the first all-Black military aviation program, created at the Tuskegee Institute in 1941, headed to North Africa as the 99th Pursuit Squadron. Their commander, Captain Benjamin O. Davis Jr., later became one of the first African American generals (his father— General Benjamin O. Davis Sr .—was the first). The Tuskegee Airmen saw combat against German and Italian troops, flew more than 3,000 missions, and served as a great source of pride for many Black Americans.

Aside from celebrated accomplishments like these, overall gains were slow, and maintaining high morale among black forces was difficult due to the continued discrimination they faced. In July 1948, President Harry S. Truman finally integrated the U.S. Armed Forces under an executive order mandating that “there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin.”

Jackie Robinson, 1947

By 1900, the unwritten color line barring Black players from white teams in professional baseball was strictly enforced. Jackie Robinson , a sharecropper’s son from Georgia , joined the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro American League in 1945 after a stint in the U.S. Army (he earned an honorable discharge after facing a court-martial for refusing to move to the back of a segregated bus). His play caught the attention of Branch Rickey, general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, who had been considering bringing an end to segregation in baseball. Rickey signed Robinson to a Dodgers farm team that same year and two years later moved him up, making Robinson the first African American player to play on a major league team.

Robinson played his first game with the Dodgers on April 15, 1947; he led the National League in stolen bases that season, earning Rookie of the Year honors. Over the next nine years, Robinson compiled a .311 batting average and led the Dodgers to six league championships and one World Series victory. Despite his success on the field, however, he encountered hostility from both fans and other players. Members of the St. Louis Cardinals even threatened to strike if Robinson played; baseball commissioner Ford Frick settled the question by threatening to suspend any player who went on strike.

After Robinson’s historic breakthrough, baseball was steadily integrated, with professional basketball and tennis following suit in 1950. His groundbreaking achievement transcended sports, and as soon as he signed the contract with Rickey, Robinson became one of the most visible African Americans in the country, and a figure that Black people could look to as a source of pride, inspiration and hope. As his success and fame grew, Robinson began speaking out publicly for Black equality. In 1949, he testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee to discuss the appeal of Communism to Black Americans, surprising them with a ferocious condemnation of the racial discrimination embodied by the Jim Crow segregation laws of the South: “The white public should start toward real understanding by appreciating that every single Negro who is worth his salt is going to resent any kind of slurs and discrimination because of his race, and he’s going to use every bit of intelligence…to stop it…”

Brown v. Board of Education, May 17, 1954

On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered its verdict in Brown v. Board of Education , ruling unanimously that racial segregation in public schools violated the 14th Amendment’s mandate of equal protection of the laws of the U.S. Constitution to any person within its jurisdiction. Oliver Brown, the lead plaintiff in the case, was one of almost 200 people from five different states who had joined related NAACP cases brought before the Supreme Court since 1938.

The landmark verdict reversed the “separate but equal” doctrine the Court had established with Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), in which it determined that equal protection was not violated as long as reasonably equal conditions were provided to both groups. In the Brown decision, Chief Justice Earl Warren famously declared that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”

Though the Court’s ruling applied specifically to public schools, it implied that other segregated facilities were also unconstitutional, thus striking a heavy blow to the Jim Crow South. As such, the ruling provoked serious resistance, including a “Southern manifesto” issued by southern congressmen denouncing it. The decision was also difficult to enforce, a fact that became increasingly clear in May 1955 when the Court remanded the case to the courts of origin due to “their proximity to local conditions” and urged “a prompt and reasonable start toward full compliance.” Though some southern schools moved towards integration relatively without incident, in other cases—notably in Arkansas and Alabama—enforcing Brown would require federal intervention.

Emmett Till, August 1955

In August 1955, a 14-year-old black boy from Chicago named Emmett Till had recently arrived in Money, Mississippi to visit relatives. While in a grocery store, he allegedly whistled and made a flirtatious remark to the white woman behind the counter, violating the strict racial codes of the Jim Crow South. Three days later, two white men—the woman’s husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam—dragged Till from his great uncle’s house in the middle of the night. After beating the boy, they shot him to death and threw his body in the Tallahatchie River. The two men confessed to kidnapping Till but were acquitted of murder charges by an all-white, all-male jury after barely an hour of deliberations. Never brought to justice, Bryant and Milam later shared vivid details of how they killed Till with a journalist for Look magazine, which published their confessions under the headline “The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi.”

Till’s mother held an open-casket funeral for her son in Chicago, hoping to bring public attention to the brutal murder. Thousands of mourners attended, and Jet magazine published a photo of the corpse. International outrage over the crime and the verdict helped fuel the civil rights movement: just three months after Emmett Till’s body was found, and a month after a Mississippi grand jury refused to indict Milam and Bryant on kidnapping charges, a citywide bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama would begin the movement in earnest.

Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, December 1955

On December 1, 1955, an African American woman named Rosa Parks was riding a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama when the driver told her to give up her seat to a white man. Parks refused and was arrested for violating the city’s racial segregation ordinances, which mandated that Black passengers sit in the back of public buses and give up their seats for white riders if the front seats were full. Parks, a 42-year-old seamstress, was also the secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP. As she later explained: “I had been pushed as far as I could stand to be pushed. I had decided that I would have to know once and for all what rights I had as a human being and a citizen.” 

Four days after Parks’ arrest, an activist organization called the Montgomery Improvement Association—led by a young pastor named Martin Luther King Jr. —spearheaded a boycott of the city’s municipal bus company. Because African Americans made up some 70 percent of the bus company’s riders at the time, and the great majority of Montgomery’s Black citizens supported the bus boycott, its impact was immediate.

About 90 participants in the Montgomery Bus Boycott , including King, were indicted under a law forbidding conspiracy to obstruct the operation of a business. Found guilty, King immediately appealed the decision. Meanwhile, the boycott stretched on for more than a year, and the bus company struggled to avoid bankruptcy. On November 13, 1956, in Browder v. Gayle, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s decision declaring the bus company’s segregation seating policy unconstitutional under the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. King, called off the boycott on December 20, and Rosa Parks—known as the “mother of the civil rights movement”—would be one of the first to ride the newly desegregated buses.

Central High School Integrated, September 1957

Although the Supreme Court declared segregation of public schools illegal in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the decision was extremely difficult to enforce, as 11 southern states enacted resolutions interfering with, nullifying or protesting school desegregation. In Arkansas, Governor Orval Faubus made resistance to desegregation a central part of his successful 1956 reelection campaign.

The following September, after a federal court ordered the desegregation of Central High School, located in the state capital of Little Rock, Faubus called out the Arkansas National Guard to prevent nine African American students from entering the school. He was later forced to call off the guard, and in the tense standoff that followed, TV cameras captured footage of white mobs converging on the “ Little Rock Nine ” outside the high school. For millions of viewers throughout the country, the unforgettable images provided a vivid contrast between the angry forces of white supremacy and the quiet, dignified resistance of African American students.

After an appeal by the local congressman and mayor of Little Rock to stop the violence, President Dwight D. Eisenhower federalized the state’s National Guard and sent 1,000 members of the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division to enforce the integration of Central High School. The nine Black students entered the school under heavily armed guard, marking the first time since Reconstruction that federal troops had provided protection for Black Americans against racial violence. Not done fighting, Faubus closed all of Little Rock’s high schools in the fall of 1958 rather than permit integration. A federal court struck down this act, and four of the nine students returned, under police protection, after the schools were reopened in 1959.

Loving v. Virginia Ruling, 1958

Mildred and Richard Loving were one of the first interracial couples legally married in the United States and their union marked a pivotal moment in marriage rights for mixed-race families. At 2 a.m. on July 11, 1958, Mildred Jeter was lying next to her husband Richard Loving, when police began knocking on their door, demanding to know about the nature of their relationship. At the time, interracial marriage was illegal in Virginia and the newly-wed couple was guilty of breaking the law.

Richard spent the night in prison, and his sister had to pay a $1,000 bond for his release. Mildred, however, spent three nights in a small women’s cell and was released to her father. The couple was then given a choice: spend 25 years in prison or leave Virginia. They chose exile and abandoned the state for nine years, making periodic trips back to visit family while trying to avoid being detected.

Amidst the civil rights movement, ACLU lawyers Bernard S. Cohen and Philip J. Hirschkop decided to take on the couple’s case. They tried to have the case vacated and the ruling overturned without success. They then tried appealing the decision to the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals, but the court ultimately stuck to the original ruling. The case eventually made its way to the Supreme Court , where a majority of members decided on June 12, 1967, that laws banning interracial marriage were unconstitutional.

Sit-In Movement and Founding of SNCC, 1960

On February 1, 1960, four Black students from the Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro, North Carolina , sat down at the lunch counter in a local branch of Woolworth’s and ordered coffee. Refused service due to the counter’s "whites-only" policy, they stayed put until the store closed, then returned the next day with other students. Heavily covered by the news media, the Greensboro sit-ins sparked a movement that spread quickly to college towns throughout the South and into the North, as young Black and white people engaged in various forms of peaceful protest against segregation in libraries, on beaches, in hotels and other establishments. Though many protesters were arrested for trespassing, disorderly conduct or disturbing the peace, their actions made an immediate impact, forcing Woolworth’s—among other establishments—to change their segregationist policies.

To capitalize on the sit-in movement ’s increasing momentum, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ( SNCC ) was founded in Raleigh, North Carolina in April 1960. Over the next few years, SNCC broadened its influence, organizing so-called “Freedom Rides” through the South in 1961 and the historic March on Washington in 1963; it also joined the NAACP in pushing for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 . Later, SNCC would mount an organized resistance to the Vietnam War . As its members faced increased violence, SNCC became more militant, and by the late 1960s it was advocating the “Black Power” philosophy of Stokely Carmichael (SNCC’s chairman from 1966–67) and his successor, H. Rap Brown. By the early 1970s, SNCC was effectively disbanded.

CORE and Freedom Rides, May 1961

Founded in 1942 by the civil rights leader James Farmer, the Congress of Racial Equality ( CORE ) sought to end discrimination and improve race relations through direct action. In its early years, CORE staged a sit-in at a Chicago coffee shop (a precursor to the successful sit-in movement of 1960) and organized a “Journey of Reconciliation,” in which a group of Black and white activists rode together on a bus through the upper South in 1947, a year after the U.S. Supreme Court banned segregation in interstate bus travel.

In Boynton v. Virginia (1960), the Court extended the earlier ruling to include bus terminals, restrooms and other related facilities, and CORE took action to test the enforcement of that ruling. In May 1961, CORE sent seven African Americans and six white Americans on a “freedom ride” on two buses from Washington, D.C. Bound for New Orleans , the freedom riders were attacked by angry segregationists outside of Anniston, Alabama, and one bus was even firebombed. Local law enforcement responded, but slowly, and U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy eventually ordered State Highway Patrol protection for the freedom riders to continue to Montgomery, Alabama, where they again encountered violent resistance.

Kennedy sent federal marshals to escort the riders to Jackson, Mississippi, but images of the bloodshed made the worldwide news, and the freedom rides continued. In September, under pressure from CORE and other civil rights organizations, as well as from the attorney general’s office, the Interstate Commerce Commission ruled that all passengers on interstate bus carriers should be seated without regard to race and carriers could not mandate segregated terminals.

Integration of Ole Miss, September 1962

By the end of the 1950s, African Americans had begun to be admitted in small numbers to white colleges and universities in the South without too much incident. In 1962, however, a crisis erupted when the state-funded University of Mississippi (known as “Ole Miss”) admitted a Black man , James Meredith. After nine years in the Air Force, Meredith had studied at the all–Black Jackson State College and applied repeatedly to Ole Miss with no success. With the aid of the NAACP, Meredith filed a lawsuit alleging that the university had discriminated against him because of his race. In September 1962, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Meredith’s favor, but state officials including Governor Ross Barnett vowed to block his admission.

When Meredith arrived at Ole Miss under the protection of federal forces including U.S. marshals, a mob of more than 2,000 people formed on the Oxford, Mississippi campus. Two people were killed and close to 200 injured in the ensuing chaos, which ended only after President Kennedy’s administration sent some 31,000 troops to restore order. Meredith went on to graduate from Ole Miss in 1963, but the struggle to integrate higher education continued. Later that year, Governor George Wallace blocked the enrollment of a Black student at the University of Alabama, pledging to “stand in the schoolhouse door.” Though Wallace was eventually forced by the federalized National Guard to integrate the university, he became a prominent symbol of the ongoing resistance to desegregation nearly a decade after Brown v. Board of Education.

Birmingham Church Bombed, 1963

Despite Martin Luther King Jr.’s inspiring words at the Lincoln Memorial during the historic March on Washington in August 1963, violence against Black people in the segregated South continued to indicate the strength of white resistance to the ideals of justice and racial harmony King espoused. In mid-September, white supremacists bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama during Sunday services; four young African American girls were killed in the explosion. The church bombing was the third in 11 days after the federal government had ordered the integration of Alabama’s school system.

Governor George Wallace was a leading foe of desegregation, and Birmingham had one of the strongest and most violent chapters of the Ku Klux Klan. Birmingham had become a leading focus of the civil rights movement by the spring of 1963 when Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested there while leading supporters of his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in a nonviolent campaign of demonstrations against segregation.

While in jail, King wrote a letter to local white ministers justifying his decision not to call off the demonstrations in the face of continued bloodshed at the hands of local law enforcement officials, led by Birmingham’s police commissioner, Eugene “Bull” Connor. “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” was published in the national press even as images of police brutality against protesters in Birmingham–including children being attacked by police dogs and knocked off their feet by fire hoses–sent shock waves around the world, helping to build crucial support for the civil rights movement.

'I Have a Dream,' 1963

On August 28, 1963, some 250,000 people—both Black and white—participated in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the largest demonstration in the history of the nation’s capital and the most significant display of the civil rights movement’s growing strength. After marching from the Washington Monument, the demonstrators gathered near the Lincoln Memorial, where a number of civil rights leaders addressed the crowd, calling for voting rights, equal employment opportunities for Black Americans and an end to racial segregation.

The last leader to appear was the Baptist preacher Martin Luther King Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), who spoke eloquently of the struggle facing Black Americans and the need for continued action and nonviolent resistance. “ I have a dream ,” King intoned, expressing his faith that one day white and Black people would stand together as equals, and there would be harmony between the races: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

King’s improvised sermon continued for nine minutes after the end of his prepared remarks, and his stirring words would be remembered as undoubtedly one of the greatest speeches in American history. At its conclusion, King quoted an “old Negro spiritual: ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!'” King’s speech served as a defining moment for the civil rights movement, and he soon emerged as its most prominent figure.

Civil Rights Act of 1964, July 1964

Thanks to the campaign of nonviolent resistance championed by Martin Luther King Jr. beginning in the late 1950s, the civil rights movement had begun to gain serious momentum in the United States by 1960. That year, John F. Kennedy made passage of new civil rights legislation part of his presidential campaign platform; he won more than 70 percent of the African American vote. Congress was debating Kennedy’s civil rights reform bill when he was killed by an assassin’s bullet in Dallas, Texas in November 1963. It was left to Lyndon Johnson (not previously known for his support of civil rights) to push the Civil Rights Act —the most far-reaching act of legislation supporting racial equality in American history—through Congress in June 1964.

At its most basic level, the act gave the federal government more power to protect citizens against discrimination on the basis of race, religion, sex or national origin. It mandated the desegregation of most public accommodations, including lunch counters, bus depots, parks and swimming pools, and established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to ensure equal treatment of minorities in the workplace. The act also guaranteed equal voting rights by removing biased registration requirements and procedures and authorized the U.S. Office of Education to provide aid to assist with school desegregation. In a televised ceremony on July 2, 1964, Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law using 75 pens; he presented one of them to King, who counted it among his most prized possessions.

Freedom Summer and the 'Mississippi Burning' Murders, June 1964

In the summer of 1964, civil rights organizations including the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) urged white students from the North to travel to Mississippi, where they helped register Black voters and build schools for Black children. The organizations believed the participation of white students in the so-called “Freedom Summer” would bring increased visibility to their efforts. The summer had barely begun, however, when three volunteers—Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, both white New Yorkers, and James Chaney, a Black Mississippian—disappeared on their way back from investigating the burning of an African American church by the Ku Klux Klan. After a massive FBI investigation (code–named “Mississippi Burning”) their bodies were discovered on August 4 buried in an earthen dam near Philadelphia, in Neshoba County, Mississippi.

Although the culprits in the case—white supremacists who included the county’s deputy sheriff—were soon identified, the state made no arrests. The Justice Department eventually indicted 19 men for violating the three volunteers’ civil rights (the only charge that would give the federal government jurisdiction over the case) and after a three-year-long legal battle, the men finally went on trial in Jackson, Mississippi. In October 1967, an all-white jury found seven of the defendants guilty and acquitted the other nine. Though the verdict was hailed as a major civil rights victory—it was the first time anyone in Mississippi had been convicted for a crime against a civil rights worker—the judge in the case gave out relatively light sentences, and none of the convicted men served more than six years behind bars.

Selma to Montgomery March, March 1965

In early 1965, Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) made Selma, Alabama, the focus of its efforts to register Black voters in the South. Alabama’s governor, George Wallace, was a notorious opponent of desegregation, and the local county sheriff had led a steadfast opposition to Black voter registration drives: Only 2 percent of Selma’s eligible Black voters had managed to register. In February, an Alabama state trooper shot a young African American demonstrator in nearby Marion, and the SCLC announced a massive protest march from Selma to the state capital in Montgomery .

On March 7, 600 marchers got as far as the Edmund Pettus Bridge outside Selma when they were attacked by state troopers wielding whips, nightsticks and tear gas. The brutal scene was captured on television, enraging many Americans and drawing civil rights and religious leaders of all faiths to Selma in protest. King himself led another attempt on March 9, but turned the marchers around when state troopers again blocked the road; that night, a group of segregationists fatally beat a protester, the young white minister James Reeb.

On March 21, after a U.S. district court ordered Alabama to permit the Selma-Montgomery march, some 2,000 marchers set out on the three-day journey, this time protected by U.S. Army troops and Alabama National Guard forces under federal control. “No tide of racism can stop us,” King proclaimed from the steps of the state capitol building, addressing the nearly 50,000 supporters—Black and white—who met the marchers in Montgomery.

Malcolm X Shot to Death, February 1965

In 1952, the former Malcolm Little was released from prison after serving six years on a robbery charge; while incarcerated, he had joined the Nation of Islam (NOI, commonly known as the Black Muslims), given up drinking and drugs and replaced his surname with an X to signify his rejection of his “slave” name. Charismatic and eloquent, Malcolm X soon became an influential leader of the NOI, which combined Islam with Black nationalism and sought to encourage disadvantaged young Black people searching for confidence in segregated America.

As the outspoken public voice of the Black Muslim faith, Malcolm challenged the mainstream civil rights movement and the nonviolent pursuit of integration championed by Martin Luther King Jr. Instead, he urged followers to defend themselves against white aggression “by any means necessary.” Mounting tensions between Malcolm and NOI founder Elijah Muhammad led Malcolm to form his own mosque in 1964. He made a pilgrimage to Mecca that same year and underwent a second conversion, this time to Sunni Islam. Calling himself el–Hajj Malik el–Shabazz, he renounced NOI’s philosophy of separatism and advocated a more inclusive approach to the struggle for Black rights.

On February 21, 1965, during a speaking engagement in Harlem, three members of the NOI rushed the stage and shot Malcolm some 15 times at close range. After Malcolm’s death, his bestselling book The Autobiography of Malcolm X popularized his ideas, particularly among Black youth, and laid the foundation for the Black Power movement of the late 1960s and 1970s.

Voting Rights Act of 1965, August 1965

Less than a week after the Selma-to-Montgomery marchers were beaten and bloodied by Alabama state troopers in March 1965, President Lyndon Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress, calling for federal legislation to ensure protection of the voting rights of African Americans. The result was the Voting Rights Act, which Congress passed in August 1965.

The Voting Rights Act sought to overcome the legal barriers that still existed at the state and local levels preventing Black citizens from exercising the right to vote given them by the 15th Amendment. Specifically, it banned literacy tests as a requirement for voting, mandated federal oversight of voter registration in areas where tests had previously been used and gave the U.S. attorney general the duty of challenging the use of poll taxes for state and local elections.

Along with the Civil Rights Act of the previous year, the Voting Rights Act was one of the most expansive pieces of civil rights legislation in American history, and it greatly reduced the disparity between Black and white voters in the U.S. In Mississippi alone, the percentage of eligible Black voters registered to vote increased from 5 percent in 1960 to nearly 60 percent in 1968. In the mid-1960s, 70 African Americans were serving as elected officials in the South, while by the turn of the century there were some 5,000. In the same time period, the number of Black people serving in Congress increased from six to about 40.

Rise of Black Power

After the heady rush of the civil rights movement’s first years, anger and frustration was increasing among many African Americans, who saw clearly that true equality—social, economic and political—still eluded them. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, this frustration fueled the rise of the Black Power movement . According to then–SNCC chairman Stokely Carmichael, who first popularized the term “Black Power” in 1966, the traditional civil rights movement and its emphasis on nonviolence, did not go far enough, and the federal legislation it had achieved failed to address the economic and social disadvantages facing Black Americans.

Black Power was a form of both self-definition and self-defense for African Americans; it called on them to stop looking to the institutions of white America—which were believed to be inherently racist—and act for themselves, by themselves, to seize the gains they desired, including better jobs, housing and education. Also in 1966, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, college students in Oakland, California , founded the Black Panther Party .

While its original mission was to protect Black people from white brutality by sending patrol groups into Black neighborhoods, the Panthers soon developed into a Marxist group that promoted Black Power by urging African Americans to arm themselves and demand full employment, decent housing and control over their own communities. Clashes ensued between the Panthers and police in California, New York and Chicago, and in 1967 Newton was convicted of voluntary manslaughter after killing a police officer. His trial brought national attention to the organization, which at its peak in the late 1960s boasted some 2,000 members.

Fair Housing Act, April 1968

The Fair Housing Act of 1968, meant as a follow-up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, marked the last great legislative achievement of the civil rights era. Originally intended to extend federal protection to civil rights workers, it was later expanded to address racial discrimination in the sale, rental or financing of housing units. After the bill passed the Senate by an exceedingly narrow margin in early April, it was thought that the increasingly conservative House of Representatives , wary of the growing strength and militancy of the Black Power movement, would weaken it considerably.

On the day of the Senate vote, however, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. Pressure to pass the bill increased amid the wave of national remorse that followed, and after a strictly limited debate, the House passed the Fair Housing Act on April 10. President Johnson signed it into law the following day. Over the next years, however, there was little decrease in housing segregation, and violence arose from Black efforts to seek housing in white neighborhoods.

From 1950 to 1980, the total Black population in America’s urban centers increased from 6.1 million to 15.3 million; during this same time period, white Americans steadily moved out of the cities into the suburbs, taking with them many of the employment opportunities Black people needed. In this way, the ghetto—an inner city community plagued by high unemployment, crime and other social ills—became an ever more prevalent fact of urban Black life.

MLK Assassinated, April 4, 1968

On April 4, 1968, the world was stunned and saddened by the news that the civil rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot and killed on the balcony of a motel in Memphis, Tennessee , where he had gone to support a sanitation workers’ strike . King’s death opened a huge rift between white and Black Americans, as many Black people saw the killing as a rejection of their vigorous pursuit of equality through the nonviolent resistance he had championed. In more than 100 cities, several days of riots, burning and looting followed his death.

The accused killer, a white man named James Earl Ray, was captured and tried immediately; he entered a guilty plea and was sentenced to 99 years in prison; no testimony was heard. Ray later recanted his confession, and despite several inquiries into the matter by the U.S. government, many continued to believe that the speedy trial had been a cover-up for a larger conspiracy. King’s assassination, along with the killing of Malcolm X three years earlier, radicalized many moderate African American activists, fueling the growth of the Black Power movement and the Black Panther Party.

The success of conservative politicians that year—including Richard Nixon ’s election as president and the third-party candidacy of the ardent segregationist George Wallace, who won 13 percent of the vote—further discouraged African Americans, many of whom felt that the tide was turning against the civil rights movement.

Shirley Chisholm Runs for President, 1972

By the early 1970s, the advances of the civil rights movement had combined with the rise of the feminist movement to create an African American women’s movement. “There can’t be liberation for half a race,” declared Margaret Sloan, one of the women behind the National Black Feminist Organization, founded in 1973. A year earlier, Representative Shirley Chisholm of New York became a national symbol of both movements as the first major party African American candidate and the first female candidate for president of the United States.

A former educational consultant and a founder of the National Women’s Caucus, Chisholm became the first Black woman in Congress in 1968, when she was elected to the House from her Brooklyn district. Though she failed to win a primary, Chisholm received more than 150 votes at the Democratic National Convention. She claimed she never expected to win the nomination. It went to George McGovern, who lost to Richard Nixon in the general election.

The outspoken Chisholm, who attracted little support among African American men during her presidential campaign, later told the press: “I’ve always met more discrimination being a woman than being Black. When I ran for the Congress, when I ran for president, I met more discrimination as a woman than for being Black. Men are men.”

The Bakke Decision and Affirmative Action, 1978

Beginning in the 1960s, the term “affirmative action” was used to refer to policies and initiatives aimed at compensating for past discrimination on the basis of race, color, sex, religion or national origin. President John F. Kennedy first used the phrase in 1961, in an executive order calling on the federal government to hire more African Americans. By the mid 1970s, many universities were seeking to increase the presence of minority and female faculty and students on their campuses. The University of California at Davis, for example, designated 16 percent of its medical school’s admissions spots for minority applicants.

After Allan Bakke, a white California man, applied twice without success, he sued U.C. Davis, claiming that his grades and test scores were higher than those of minority students who were admitted and accusing UC Davis of “reverse discrimination.” In June 1978, in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the use of strict racial quotas was unconstitutional and that Bakke should be admitted; on the other hand, it held that institutions of higher education could rightfully use race as a criterion in admissions decisions in order to ensure diversity.

In the wake of the Bakke verdict, affirmative action continued to be a controversial and divisive issue, with a growing opposition movement claiming that the so-called “racial playing field” was now equal and that African Americans no longer needed special consideration to overcome their disadvantages. In subsequent decisions over the next decades, the Court limited the scope of affirmative action programs, while several U.S. states prohibited racially based affirmative action.

Jesse Jackson Galvanizes Black Voters, 1984

As a young man, Jesse Jackson left his studies at the Chicago Theological Seminary to join Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in its crusade for Black civil rights in the South; when King was assassinated in Memphis in April 1968, Jackson was at his side. In 1971, Jackson founded PUSH, or People United to Save Humanity (later changed to People United to Serve Humanity), an organization that advocated self-reliance for African Americans and sought to establish racial parity in the business and financial community.

He was a leading voice for Black Americans during the early 1980s, urging them to be more politically active and heading up a voter registration drive that led to the election of Harold Washington as the first Black mayor of Chicago in 1983. The following year, Jackson ran for the Democratic nomination for president. On the strength of his Rainbow/PUSH Coalition , he placed third in the primaries, propelled by a surge of Black voter participation.

He ran again in 1988 and received 6.6 million votes, or 24 percent of the total primary vote, winning seven states and finishing second behind the eventual Democratic nominee, Michael Dukakis. Jackson’s continued influence in the Democratic Party in the decades that followed ensured that African American issues had an important role in the party’s platform. 

Throughout his long career, Jackson has inspired both admiration and criticism for his tireless efforts on behalf of the Black community and his outspoken public persona. His son, Jesse L. Jackson Jr., won election to the U.S. House of Representatives from Illinois in 1995.

Oprah Winfrey Launches Syndicated Talk Show, 1986

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the success of the long-running sitcom The Cosby Show —featuring popular comedian Bill Cosby as the doctor patriarch of a close-knit middle-class African American family—helped redefine the image of Black characters on mainstream American television. Suddenly, there was no lack of educated, upwardly mobile, family-oriented Black characters for TV viewers to look to, both in fiction and in life. In 1980, entrepreneur Robert L. Johnson founded Black Entertainment Television (BET), which he later sold to entertainment giant Viacom for some $3 billion. Perhaps the most striking phenomenon, however, was the rise of Oprah Winfrey .

Born in rural Mississippi to a poor unwed teenage mother, Winfrey got her start in television news before taking over a morning talk show in Chicago in 1984. Two years later, she launched her own nationally syndicated talk show, The Oprah Winfrey Show, which would go on to become the highest rated in TV history. Celebrated for her ability to talk candidly about a wide range of issues, Winfrey spun her talk show success into a one-woman empire—including acting, film and television production and publishing.

She notably promoted the work of Black female writers, forming a film company to produce movies based on novels like The Color Purple , by Alice Walker, and Beloved , by Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison. (She starred in both.) One of the most influential individuals in entertainment and the first Black female billionaire, Winfrey is also an active philanthropist, giving generously to Black South Africans and to the historically Black Morehouse College, among other causes.

Los Angeles Riots, 1992

In March 1991, officers with the California Highway Patrol attempted to pull an African American man named Rodney King over for speeding on a Los Angeles freeway. King, who was on probation for robbery and had been drinking, led them on a high-speed chase, and by the time the patrolmen caught up to his car, several officers of the Los Angeles Police Department were on the scene. After King allegedly resisted arrest and threatened them, four LAPD officers shot him with a TASER gun and severely beat him.

Caught on videotape by an onlooker and broadcast around the world, the beating inspired widespread outrage in the city’s African American community, who had long condemned the racial profiling and abuse its members suffered at the hands of the police force. Many demanded that the unpopular L.A. police chief, Daryl Gates, be fired and that the four officers be brought to justice for their use of excessive force. The King case was eventually tried in the suburb of Simi Valley, and in April 1992 a jury found the officers not guilty.

Rage over the verdict sparked the four days of the L.A. riots , beginning in the mostly Black South Central neighborhood. By the time the riots subsided, some 55 people were dead, more than 2,300 injured, and more than 1,000 buildings had been burned. Authorities later estimated the total damage at around $1 billion. The next year, two of the four LAPD officers involved in the beating were retried and convicted in a federal court for violating King’s civil rights; he eventually received $3.8 million from the city in a settlement.

Million Man March, 1995

In October 1995, hundreds of thousands of Black men gathered in Washington, D.C. for the Million Man March, one of the largest demonstrations of its kind in the capital’s history. Its organizer, Minister Louis Farrakhan, had called for “a million sober, disciplined, committed, dedicated, inspired Black men to meet in Washington on a day of atonement.” Farrakhan, who had asserted control over the Nation of Islam (commonly known as the Black Muslims) in the late 1970s and reasserted its original principles of Black separatism, may have been an incendiary figure, but the idea behind the Million Man March was one most Black—and many white—people could get behind.

The march was intended to bring about a kind of spiritual renewal among Black men and to instill in them a sense of solidarity and of personal responsibility to improve their own condition. It would also, organizers believed, disprove some of the stereotypical negative images of Black men that existed in American society.

By that time, the U.S. government’s “war on drugs” had sent a disproportionate number of African Americans to prison, and by 2000, more Black men were incarcerated than in college. Estimates of the number of participants in the Million Man March ranged from 400,000 to more than 1 million, and its success spurred the organization of a Million Woman March, which took place in 1997 in Philadelphia.

Colin Powell Becomes Secretary of State, 2001

As chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1989 to 1993—the first African American to hold that position—the Vietnam veteran and four–star U.S. Army general Colin Powell played an integral role in planning and executing the first Persian Gulf War under President George H.W. Bush . After his retirement from the military in 1993, many people began floating his name as a possible presidential candidate. He decided against running, but soon became a prominent fixture in the Republican Party.

In 2001, George W. Bush appointed Powell as secretary of state, making him the first African American to serve as America’s top diplomat. Powell sought to build international support for the controversial U.S invasion of Iraq in 2003, delivering a divisive speech to the United Nations regarding that country’s possession of weapons material that was later revealed to be based on faulty intelligence. He resigned after Bush’s reelection in 2004.

In another history-making appointment, Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s longtime foreign policy adviser and the former head of the National Security Council, succeeded Powell, becoming the first African American woman to serve as secretary of state. Though he largely stayed out of the political spotlight after stepping down, Powell remained an admired figure in Washington and beyond.

Though he continued to brush off any speculation of a possible future presidential run, Powell made headlines during the 2008 presidential campaign when he broke from the Republican party to endorse Barack Obama , the eventual winner and the first African American to be elected president of the United States.

Barack Obama Becomes 44th US President, 2008

On January 20, 2009, Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States; he is the first African American to hold that office. The product of an interracial marriage—his father grew up in a small village in Kenya, his mother in Kansas—Obama grew up in Hawaii but discovered his civic calling in Chicago, where he worked for several years as a community organizer on the city’s largely Black South Side.

After studying at Harvard Law School and practicing constitutional law in Chicago, he began his political career in 1996 in the Illinois State Senate and in 2004 announced his candidacy for a newly vacant seat in the U.S. Senate . He delivered a rousing keynote speech at that year’s Democratic National Convention, attracting national attention with his eloquent call for national unity and cooperation across party lines. In February 2007, just months after he became only the third African American elected to the U.S. Senate since Reconstruction, Obama announced his candidacy for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination.

After withstanding a tight Democratic primary battle with Hillary Clinton, the New York senator and former first lady, Obama defeated Senator John McCain of Arizona in the general election that November. Obama’s appearances in both the primaries and the general election drew impressive crowds, and his message of hope and change—embodied by the slogan “Yes We Can”—inspired thousands of new voters, many young and Black, to cast their vote for the first time in the historic election. He was reelected in 2012.

The Black Lives Matter Movement 

The term “Black lives matter” was first used by organizer Alicia Garza in a July 2013 Facebook post in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman, a Florida man who shot and killed unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin on February 26, 2012. Martin’s death set off nationwide protests like the Million Hoodie March. In 2013, Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi formed the Black Lives Matter Network with the mission to “eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes.” 

The hashtag #BlackLivesMatter first appeared on Twitter on July 13, 2013, and spread widely as high-profile cases involving the deaths of Black civilians provoked renewed outrage.

A series of deaths of Black Americans at the hands of police officers continued to spark outrage and protests, including Eric Garner in New York City, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Tamir Rice in Cleveland Ohio and Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland.

The Black Lives Matter movement gained renewed attention on September 25, 2016, when San Francisco 49ers players Eric Reid, Eli Harold, and quarterback Colin Kaepernick kneeled during the national anthem before the game against the Seattle Seahawks to draw attention to recent acts of police brutality. Dozens of other players in the NFL and beyond followed suit. 

George Floyd Protests

The movement swelled to a critical juncture on May 25, 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 epidemic when 46-year-old George Floyd died after being handcuffed and pinned to the ground by police officer Derek Chauvin. 

Chauvin was filmed kneeling on Floyd’s neck for more than eight minutes. Floyd had been accused of using a counterfeit $20 bill at a local deli in Minneapolis. All four officers involved in the incident were fired. In April 2021, Chauvin  was convicted of second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. In February 2022, the three other officers were found guilty of depriving Floyd of his civil rights when they helped with the restraint that led to his death. 

Floyd’s killing came on the heels of two other high-profile cases in 2020. On February 23, 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery was killed while out on a run after being followed by three white men in a pickup truck. And on March 13, 26-year-old EMT Breonna Taylor  was shot eight times and killed after police broke down the door to her apartment while executing a nighttime warrant.

On May 26, 2020, the day after Floyd’s death, protestors in Minneapolis took to the streets to protest Floyd’s killing. Police cars were set on fire and officers released tear gas to disperse crowds. After months of quarantine and isolation during a global pandemic, protests mounted, spreading across the country in the following days and weeks.

Kamala Harris Becomes the First Woman and First Black US Vice President, 2021

In January 2021, Kamala Harris became the first woman and first woman of color to become vice president of the United States. Then-candidate  Joe Biden had nominated Harris in August 2020 during the Democratic party’s “remote” national convention. Harris, whose mother immigrated to the United States from India and whose father immigrated from Jamaica, was the first person of African or Asian descent to become a major party’s vice presidential candidate—and the first to win the office. 

In her victory speech in November 2020, Harris said that she was thinking "about the generations of women, Black women, Asian, white, Latina, Native American women—who throughout our nation’s history have paved the way for this moment tonight—women who fought and sacrificed so much for equality and liberty and justice for all.”

HISTORY Vault: Black History

Watch acclaimed Black History documentaries on HISTORY Vault.

Ferguson shooting victim Michael Brown. BBC . George Floyd Protests: A Timeline. The New York Times . Tamir Rice. PBS.org. The Matter of Black Lives. The New Yorker . The Hashtag Black Lives Matter. Pew Research . The Path to Eric Garner’s death. The New York Times . Timeline of Murder Trial of Amber Guyger. ABC . 

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Stanford scholars reflect on Black history in their lives and work

Humanities and social sciences scholars reflect on “Black history as American history” and its impact on their personal and professional lives.

As Black History Month comes to a close, Stanford faculty reflect on the crucial contributions of Black Americans that should be studied and celebrated not only during February but also throughout the year. Whether examining the impact of writers like Toni Morrison, Civil War-era abolitionists or present-day political activists in Georgia, scholars from the humanities and social sciences emphasize that the history of Black Americans is essential to understanding our nation and our world.

Below, scholars from the School of Humanities and Sciences talk about how an understanding of Black history has shaped them personally and is integral to their research and work.

Hakeem Jefferson (Image credit: Harrison Truong)

Hakeem Jefferson Assistant Professor, Political Science

This year’s Black History Month comes on the heels of a white supremacist insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. With this tragic event in mind, I am reminded that Black people have long served as the conscience of nations around the world in moments of crisis. I am reminded of brave abolitionists and freedom fighters and artists and everyday people who, with everything to lose, including life itself, have stood as vanguards and safekeepers of our democracy. And as a political scientist whose work tries to highlight the diversity and complexity of Black politics, I am reminded of Black activists and organizers in places like Georgia and Texas and Arizona who are working right now to make real the promise of democracy not just for Black people but also for all of us.

As a community of scholars, we have an opportunity to join these efforts, and this Black History Month offers us another opportunity to recommit ourselves to the cause of democracy – a cause Black people in this country have been advancing for generations and continue to advance today. The real question is whether we have the courage to stand with them.

Tomás Jiménez (Image credit: L.A. Cicero)

Tomás Jiménez Associate Professor, Sociology

Black history is American history. At each step in our nation’s development, Black Americans have led the call and shown by example how to live out the promise in our founding documents. Living up to that promise is an ongoing project. Taking up the challenge of that project requires reckoning with the ways that institutions and individuals have subjugated Black Americans through direct action, inaction or both. It also requires honoring the contributions of Black Americans to every aspect of American life, from politics and science, to art and spirituality.

It is well worth honoring the widely known individuals who have made those contributions. But we should also lift up individuals for whom there will never be a monument or plaque, but who have worked in every facet of American life to make our country a better place. They too made and continue to make Black history; to make American history.

Paula M. L. Moya (Image credit: L.A. Cicero)

Paula M. L. Moya Danily C. and Laura Louise Bell Professor in the Humanities Professor, English

I study literature written by people of African descent not just for its wisdom, profundity, sadness and humor, but also because not to do so would leave me ignorant of a crucial history that has contributed fundamentally to making our nation what it is.

Toni Morrison is, for me and so many others, a beacon of wisdom and truth. Her writings, along with those of Frantz Fanon, Audre Lorde, Toni Cade Bambara and James Baldwin (among others), have taught me important lessons about how I, as a human being and also as a woman of color, can live with generosity in this challenging but beautiful world. I treasure their words, I carry them around in my heart and I use them to guide me as I make difficult decisions about who to care for and how to love even those who might not seek to love me back.

Patrick Phillips (Image credit: Marion Ettlinger)

Patrick Phillips Professor, English Interim Director, Creative Writing Program

I see the history of Black Americans as another name for  real American history – for our full history as a nation. And I think more people are finally rejecting a whitewashed version of the past, designed to protect white people from ever facing the monumental crimes of our ancestors, and from ever acknowledging the central role of African Americans in building American prosperity.

I learned this firsthand when I was doing research for a book about my hometown’s long-hidden history of lynching, white-supremacist terror and land theft. It also chronicles the lives of heroic Black residents who, amid crushing injustice, built new lives in post-Emancipation Georgia.

As a white southerner, I see the study of Black history as an urgent corrective to white America’s long tradition of willful ignorance and complicit silence. For as James Baldwin said, “it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.”

Steven O. Roberts (Image credit: L.A. Cicero)

Steven O. Roberts Assistant Professor, Psychology

“History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history.” —James Baldwin

We, as individuals and as a collective, cannot understand ourselves if we do not understand Black history. And the term itself is important to contextualize. Black history is U.S. history. It is human history. To understand Black history is to know the strength and resilience necessary to affirm one’s humanity, as affirmed by Malcolm and Queen Nzinga and many others. To understand Black history is to feel the heart and depth necessary to sing in soul, as sang by Aretha and Cooke and many others. To understand Black history is to understand what has been and what should be.

There ain’t no history like Black history, and I’m so honored to carry that history with me.

BlackPast is dedicated to providing a global audience with reliable and accurate information on the history of African America and of people of African ancestry around the world. We aim to promote greater understanding through this knowledge to generate constructive change in our society.

African american history: research guides & websites.

Regarding Websites:

Web research can be very useful and lead to much useful and important information. While every effort has been made to list only “reliable” sites, researchers should be aware that control of sites change (often without notice) from time to time and, thus, the reliability and point of view of the website may change (for better or worse). One of the best uses of web information is to locate good primary and secondary sources that should be directly examined. Websites also go out of existence, so, for scholarly work, they are not reliable sources, like a published work which, presumably, will always be available in some library (Library of Congress) for examination. Beware especially of quoting or otherwise relying upon unidentified opinions found on websites. Basic guide to web research:

• Use your library BEFORE you start your web research. You will learn many terms that will be useful in your web research. You should read at least one good, broad secondary source on the subject before starting your research.
• Learn how to do web research. Google has a very good set of instructions. USE THEM!
• Know the site you are using. Find out who is responsible for it. An example of a very good site is the Avalon Project at the Yale Law School (use Google to find it.)
• Find the original printed source of the information given on the site. You may have to use your library sources or a research librarian to help you. Cite both the internet source and the printed source.

Major Research Guides and Resources–African American History 

• Freedom Narratives: Testimonies of West Africans from the Era of Slavery

Teacher Resources

• The Making of African American Identity, Pt. 1: 1500-1865
• The Making of African American Identity, Pt. 2: 1865-1917
• The Making of African American Identity, Pt. 3: 1917-1968
• Freedom’s Story, Teaching African American Literature and History

Research Resources

• Black Press USA Excellent online news service provides current national and local news articles on this website sponsored by the National Newspaper Publishers Association and the Black Press. Billed as “your independent source of news for the African American community,” the website includes links to Black Press  online newspapers  organized by state, a history section, press releases, and a search engine. A bit slow loading (as of 6/18/01), but highly recommended.
• Ebony Online Abstracts (not full text) of selected articles and features from current issue only. Abstracts function as a sort of expanded table of contents meant to lead the online reader to subscribe or otherwise seek out the physical magazine to continue reading the article of interest. No archived issues or articles, no search engine, no full table of contents or index.
• Freedom’s Journal Full text digitized copies of the nation’s first African American owned and operated newspaper, 1827-1829. The first 20 issues are currently (6/00) available free online, with the remaining 80 some issues scheduled to follow. Adobe Acrobat reader necessary, and available online for downloading if needed. From the State Historical Society of Wisconsin Library, a leader in the collection, preservation, and promotion of African American periodicals.
• Google Cultural Institute: Black History and Culture  Google has gathered together a vast collection of more than 4,000 online primary sources including documents, photographs, and other artifacts that illustrate African American history.  One document, for example, is Frederick Douglass’s handwritten 1857 letter to his former owner. Another  shows the famous Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, site of the 1965 “Bloody Sunday” attack on Civil Rights marchers by Alabama State Troopers.
• Legal Defense Fund (NAACP) web page
• Library of Congress – Map Collections, 1500-2003
• NAACP Online  Homepage of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
• National Archives (Washington, D.C.)
• Vibe Online Online version of this well-known youth-oriented music and culture magazine. Loaded with graphics, advertisements, illustrations, and articles.
• Western Journal of Black Studies Online index to this well-known literary research journal; includes links to the reference sections of articles from 1977-present. Some sections are available to online subscribers only; subscriptions available to individuals for a fee. Copies of this journal, 1997-present, are available

OTHER NOTABLE RESOURCES

• African American Women Writers Exemplary online resource presents text and images from the renowned Schomburg Center on the topic of African American women writers of the 19th century. Contents are searchable by title, author, and by literary genre (poetry, essays, etc.). Also includes a number of accompanying essays.
• Digital Schomburg: Images of African Americans from the 19th Century One of many noteworthy projects from the Schomburg Center, this digital photo album is searchable by broad category (such as “family,” “education,” “civil war,” or by keywords. Also included are brief essays that give an introduction to the photographs, as well as the broader topic of searching the past.
• Flashbacks: African American Education From the archives of the Atlantic Monthly magazine, historic essays from W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington on the topic of African American education. Also includes Bernard W. Harleston’s 1965 essay “ Higher Education for the Negro ,” Claude M. Steele’s 1992 “ Race and the Schooling of Black Americans ,” and Nicholas Lemann’s 1993 “ Philadelphia: Black Nationalism on Campus .”
• Flashbacks: Black History, American History More from the archives of the Atlantic Monthly, a number of important, full-text essays including Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “ The Negro is your brother ” (popularly known as the “ Letter from Birmingham Jai l”), a number of essay debates between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois (including “ The Awakening of the Negro ,” “ Strivings of the Negro People, ” and others), plus an interview with Du Bois.
• The African American Coal Miner Information Center This site provides information on African American coal miners and coal mining families. It also includes a synopsis of African American coal mining experience and a growing list of miners in alphabetical order by last name, many with the place of birth.

African Americans (General)

• African American History in Allegany County, Maryland
• African American Voices in Congress
• Binding Wounds, Pushing Boundaries: African Americans in Civil War Medicine
• Black Quotidian: Everyday History in African American Newspapers
• Great Black Heroes (Podcasts)
• Great Black Inventors
• Black History in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois
• Center for Black Music Research
• Charles L Blockson Afro-American Collection, Temple University
• Creole History in Louisiana
• The History Makers.org
• History of Black Theater in America
• National Gallery of Art – African American Artists
• Pointe Coupee Parish History
• The Faces of Science: African Americans in the Sciences
• The Internet African American History Challenge
• The Mark E. Mitchell Collection of African American History
• The National Caucus and Center on Black Aged
• Unified Committee for Afro-American History in St. Mary’s County, Maryland
• Upper Housatonic Valley African American Heritage Trail

African American Women

• African American Women’s History on About.com
• American Women’s History: A Research Guide (African American Women)
• Association of Black Women’s Historians
• History of Black Women in Mathematics
• National Archives for Black Women’s History
• National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs
• National Council of Negro Women

African Americans to 1860

• A Recently Discovered (2015) Jupiter Hammon Poem
• American Slave Narratives
• The Barbados and the Carolinas Legacy Foundation
• Citizens ALL: African Americans in Connecticut 1700-1850
• Freedom on the Move
• God’s Little Acre: American’s Colonial African Cemetery (Newport, Rhode Island)
• New York City Freedom Trail
• Slave Rebellions (The History Channel)
• The Five Major Slave Rebellions (PBS)
• The Middle Passage
• The Slave Rebellion Website
• Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture

The Civil War Era:

• African American Civil War Memorial
• Freedmen and Southern Society Project
• FREE BOY: A True Story of Slave and Master
• Freedmen’s Bureau Files

African Americans, 1877-1900

• African American Experience in Ohio, 1852-1920
• Afro-American Sources in Virginia
• Frontline: Booker T. & W.E.B. DuBois
• Up From Slavery: An Autobiography by Booker T. Washington

Wyoming’s Black Past

African Americans, 1901-1945

• Black Baseball’s Negro Baseball Leagues
• Fritz Pollard Alliance
• Larry Lester’s History of Black Baseball
• Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association
• Now What a Time: Blues, Gospel, and the Fort Valley Music Festivals, 1938-1943
• Red Hot Jazz Archive: A History of Jazz before 1930
• The Double V Campaign , World War II campaign for civil rights
• The Langston Hughes Research Center
• Vermont Area 9th and 10th (Horse) Cavalry Association
• Without Sanctuary,  a collection of photographs of lynchings (Warning: images are graphic)

African Americans, 1946-2000

• Artsy’s Romare Bearden Page
• Malcom X: A Research Site
• The 24th Infantry in Korea
• The Brown Decision in Norfolk, Virginia
• The Martin Luther King, Jr., Center for Nonviolent Social Change

African Americans in the 21st Century

• African Scientific Institute
• Black In Appalachia
• Elbert Williams: First to Die
• State Sanctioned: Black Lives Matter Movement
• The Elbert Williams Memorial, Brownsville, Tennessee, June 20, 2015
• The Henrietta Lacks Foundation
• The Trayvon Martin Foundation

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Donate today to help us advance Black history education and foster a more inclusive understanding of our shared cultural heritage.

Black History Essay Topics

• Writing Essays
• Writing Research Papers
• English Grammar
• M.Ed., Education Administration, University of Georgia
• B.A., History, Armstrong State University

Black history is full of fascinating stories, rich culture, great art, and courageous acts that were undertaken within unthinkable circumstances. While Civil Rights events are the most common themes in our studies, we should resist equating Black history only with Civil Rights-era history. This list contains 50 prompts that might lead you into some interesting and little-known information about Black American history.

Note: Your first challenge in studying some of the topics below is finding resources. When conducting an internet search, be sure to place quotation marks around your search term (try different variations) to narrow your results.

• Black American newspapers
• Black Inventors
• Black soldiers in the American Revolution
• Black soldiers in the Civil War
• Buffalo Soldiers
• Buying time
• Camp Logan Riots
• Clennon Washington King, Jr.
• Coffey School of Aeronautics
• Crispus Attucks
• Domestic labor strikes in the South
• Finding lost family members after emancipation
• First African Baptist Church
• Formerly enslaved business owners
• Freedom's Journal
• Gospel music
• Gullah heritage
• Harlem Hellfighters
• Harlem Renaissance
• Harriet Tubman
• Historically Black Colleges
• History of rock-and-roll
• Jumping the broom
• Manumission papers
• Maroon villages in the eighteenth century
• Motown Records
• Multi-cultural pirate ships
• Narratives by Enslaved People
• Otelia Cromwell
• Ownership of property by enslaved people
• Purchasing freedom
• Ralph Waldo Tyler
• Register of Free Persons of Color
• Secret schools in antebellum America
• Sherman's March followers
• Susie King Taylor
• The Amistad
• The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters
• The Communist Party (involvement)
• The Great Migration
• The Haitian Revolution
• Tuskegee Airmen
• Underground Railroad
• Urban enslavement (related to buying time)
• Wilberforce College, Ohio
• Celebrating Black History Month
• Important Cities in Black History
• What Is Black History Month and How Did It Begin?
• Black History and Women's Timeline: 1900–1919
• Black History Timeline: 1700 - 1799
• Black History Timeline: 1910–1919
• Biography of Dr. Carter G. Woodson, Black Historian
• Black History Timeline: 1865–1869
• Black History Month Printables
• Black History Timeline: 1920–1929
• Little Known Important Black Americans
• Black History and Women's Timeline: 1920-1929
• Important Black Women in American History
• Black History and Women Timeline 1870-1899
• Black History Timeline: 1940–1949
• Black History from 1950–1959

• Our Mission

Exploring the Vastness of Black History

Students can learn a lot about the Black experience in America when teachers seek out a variety of resources to supplement their curriculum.

Black History Month, the brainchild of Dr. Carter G. Woodson, is an opportunity for students to continue learning about the accomplishments and contributions of Black people in U.S. and world history. I say continuing because it was Dr. Woodson’s intention that this month serve as a cumulative showcasing of the Black history that students learned throughout the school year.

Sadly, Black History Month is frequently used as a time to rehash lessons on people and places without any power or purpose. It’s also become a yearly tradition of chronologically positioning the start of Black history with African enslavement, introducing to students the first Black person to do this or that, and culminating with reteaching a sugarcoated Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., centering on color-blind myth making  courtesy of misinterpreting the “I Have a Dream” speech.

That’s not teaching Black history. That’s checking off a box.

Consider New (to You) Information

The history of Black people is not a history of docility, assimilation, or resignation. Our history is a history of resistance, revolution, and making a way out of no way.

For example, consider the freedom fighters commonly known as the Black Seminoles . These were enslaved peoples who escaped to Florida from South Carolina and Georgia and established maroon communities near the newly formed Seminole Nation. They fought in numerous wars with Indigenous peoples against the United States military to protect their homes and freedom. In describing those wars, U.S. General Thomas Jesup wrote, “This… is a Negro war, not an Indian war.”

Although the Black Seminoles were ultimately unsuccessful and exiled to the western frontier, many escaped the slaveholding Creek Nation of Oklahoma and fled to Northern Mexico, where they received a land grant from the government to establish communities to defend the northern border against Indigenous raids. They successfully defended themselves from the likes of the Texas Rangers as well, while serving as a haven for enslaved people in search of freedom.

Sadly, most if not all students are unaware of that history. However, those who are uncomfortable with the truth will continue to ensure that students don’t learn it.

Explore the Vastness of Black History

Learning new ideas and new concepts should make us all uncomfortable, and out of that discomfort comes growth. Growth doesn’t come by way of redundancy or complacency. It doesn’t come with doing the same thing and expecting a different result: That’s insanity.

Rather, what’s needed are teachers who are committed to teaching Black history—throughout the year—and go beyond the narrow scope of what Black History Month has become. Explore with your students the vast universe of Black history that challenges the understanding of the United States as a shining city on a hill . This investigation will reveal, as historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz says in her book Not “A Nation of Immigrants” , “White supremacy and settler colonial violence is embedded in U.S. topography.”

To do this, teachers can utilize resources that go beyond the textbooks and schoolwide curricular supports offered to them. Here are three key resource areas I utilize to do this work.

1.  Social media followings:  I am active on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. On those specific platforms, I intentionally follow Black scholars, Black journalists, and Black educators who regularly share insights and resources. The resources are usually books and essays on Black history or the history of the United States in relation to Black people.

These accounts also post research reports detailing the condition of Black people in the United States with facts, figures, and statistics developed by social scientists—providing a narrative and analysis. For example, I follow Yale professor Elijah Anderson , and in a tweet he shared a newspaper article about Louis Armstrong speaking of how he was physically sick after seeing Bloody Sunday on the news. I could use this to speak about the Black entertainers who funded the civil rights movement and teach a timely lesson comparing their activism with that of Black entertainers today, particularly on the topic of voter rights.

2.  Listening to podcasts:  I enjoy listening to podcasts because they’re a great way to help make car rides to and from work more pleasant. I learn a ton and also get some recommendations for books and articles to read.

For example, I listen to SiriusXM radio host Karen Hunter’s The Hub , where numerous episodes are dedicated to lessons offered by Howard University professor Greg Carr  on Black history. His lessons have run the gamut, from the Black support for Latin American independence movements to the legacy of Black athletes attending HBCUs. With each lesson, Dr. Carr provides resources, from scholars to the books they’ve written. From these lessons, I gain inspiration to teach my students similarly, while being amazed at how much more there is to learn.

3. Subscriptions to academic journals: When I was in graduate school, I had the luxury of the university library to access academic journals like the The Journal of Negro Education , The Journal of Negro History , Phylon , and Journal of Black Studies , where I’ve learned the very Black history I teach my own students.

No longer a graduate student, I have to pay for access, and so I’ve decided to utilize a free account option for independent researchers offered by Jstor . With free access, anyone can read up to 100 articles a month. I now have access to the same journals I had access to as a graduate student. I encourage all educators to take advantage of this free opportunity to access this resource to support teaching and learning.

Whether teachers realize it or not, they are curators of information and knowledge. When we fail to accompany our lessons with any purpose or power, we do our students a disservice. The history of the Black experience is all about purpose and power. Therefore, teach Black history with that reality in mind. It starts with curating new ways to access and learn hidden knowledge.

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Copyright, 2023

Black History Month 2021: The only way forward is through, together

Black americans stand at the crossroads of racism and the systems of oppression that perpetuate it. we go forward from here with faith, bold strategy..

It’s an understatement to say that 2020 got on Black folks’ collective last nerve. 

We began the year with a COVID-19 pandemic that hit us harder than any other group of Americans and exposed the systemic inequities still at the root of the nation’s institutions despite the gains of the civil rights movement.

Black people were among essential workers risking their lives to serve others, but also among the first to lose their jobs after stay-at-home orders shuttered businesses in every state. Many of us lost friends and relatives and were unable, due to social distancing, to mourn them properly. 

Police-involved killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd sent us into the streets with our masks on to protest a law enforcement system that doesn’t protect us. To salt the wounds, racist rhetoric supported in the nation’s highest places pitted white Americans against Black Americans at a time when we all needed so badly to work together.

Then 2021 arrived with an attack on the U.S. Capitol six days in by “patriots” bent on murder and destruction largely because the November election – of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, the first Black person and first woman to hold that office – didn’t go their way.

But as House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn notes in an exclusive essay for USA TODAY, this historical moment of chaos and confusion is not unfamiliar terrain. Last year was not without some victories, and 2021 is not without hope.

More: Rep. Jim Clyburn: Our country is at a crossroads. We must urgently reclaim King's vision of America

More: Martin Luther King Jr.'s words of unity and truth transcend how they are often twisted

In 1967, the beloved community Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. sought to build, seemingly buoyed by civil rights legislation, seemed further away than ever. Police brutality in Watts in Los Angeles exploded into rebellion just after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and white backlash to integration seemed to threaten democracy itself. Young Black activists were at odds with their elders over who should lead the movement. 

So King put the question to the people in the title of his last book, "Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community?" This is the same question before us more than 50 years later.

Black people I’ve talked to on nearly a year’s worth of Zoom calls have all said the same thing: Black folks have had hard times before, we know how to get through them. With faith, we will come forth stronger and better, but we all have to do it together. 

We need to first examine how we got here. How do we dismantle ideas and systems that keep racism alive?  We also need to hold our leaders as accountable for progress as we do ourselves.

More: 'Where Do We Go from Here?' King's question amid the chaos of the '60s still resonates today

There is the promise of vaccines for COVID-19. There is excitement in the election of Biden and Harris. Presidents of historically Black colleges and universities are hoping for Biden’s support. Black women like Donna Brazile, political strategist for several Democratic presidents, and Black girls like Rep. Ilhan Omar’s daughter can’t wait for the inspiration Harris will bring.

As King said in 1967 and Clyburn says today, we are at a crossroads. But as much as we want things to right themselves, we can’t rush the process. We can’t heal as a people, as a country, until we’ve taken time to examine everything that has so clearly gone wrong and allowed all voices to be heard.  

Where do we go from here? The short answer: Forward. Through still-difficult times to the other, better side. There’s no going back to a “normal” that never worked that well for Black people anyway.  

The only way forward is through. 

For more stories on how we move forward together, see this year's Black History Month special edition, on newsstands and in USA TODAY's online store .

Black Women Have Written History for over a Century

Barriers of racism and sexism slowed them down, but academia wasn’t their only venue.

Black History Month is packed with reflections of figures from the past whose names have sometimes been long buried or ignored. But what about the historians who unearthed and preserved their stories to begin with? Many of them were women , writes Pero Gaglo Dagbovie—and they made critically important contributions to the field of history itself.

Dagbovie explores the work of Black women historians between 1890 and the mid-1950s. It was a time of dramatic change for Black Americans, who pushed forward into the academy and the professions despite social and financial barriers. Men saw opportunities before women, who were socialized to seek professional roles defined as feminine while they also faced the roadblock of racism. As a result, many Black women historians were unable to break into academia.

That doesn’t mean they didn’t find ways to hone their education and expertise. From self-taught historians to Progressive-era novelists to those who at last did receive professional training and doctorates, Dagbovie characterizes history’s Black women as dynamic and driven.

Among them were Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Pauline E. Hopkins, who wrote novels during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Harper’s Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted , plumbed the history of slavery and Reconstruction, challenging notions of enslaved people as monolithic or passive. Her cultured, socially engaged heroine Iola helped “dictate a program” for middle-class Black women, implying their importance and their ability to map a future for their race. Hopkins also reenvisioned Black history through novels aimed at uplifting Black women.

Other Black women historians refined their craft without the benefit of a formal education. They scoured history for important Black women, traced family histories, and published pamphlets and books that attempted to piece together a history of Black people in America. Self-educated historians like Leila Amos Pendleton, Laura Eliza Wilkes, and Elizabeth Lindsay Davis wrote monographs in an attempt to correct the record, inspire social reform, and engender Black pride.

When it came to formal graduate education, Black women trailed behind their male counterparts by at least thirty years. The first Black woman historian to receive a Ph.D. was Anna Julia Cooper, who earned her doctorate from the Sorbonne in 1925. Though her work was little known during her day, it laid the foundation for a new generation of women scholars. Marion Thompson Wright earned her Ph.D. in history in 1940, the first Black woman in America to do so, and was followed by a flood others.

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Most of these women focused on Black history—a reflection of both the barriers they faced and their passionate desire to document and interpret the history of their people. For Dagbovie, their stories embody “intellectual struggle, self-definition, and empowerment.” Though many of these early historians lacked the official recognition of their discipline, they declared themselves historians nonetheless, creating “distinguishable and valuable niches for themselves among the chroniclers of the American past.” Yet white people, and men, still dominate the historical profession—a reflection of the ingrained biases of academia and the historical profession as a whole.

As Dagbovie writes, Black women should be considered an “essential component” of Black history and its pursuit. If not for the labors of historians like Dagbovie, their stories might continue to be downplayed or even forgotten.

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Black History Is About More Than Oppression

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I begin by asking a simple question, why can’t we get Black history education right? The desire to write and learn Black history has been a priority by Black communities for over a century. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Black educators including Edward A. Johnson, Booker T. Washington, Lelia Amos Pendleton, Carter G. Woodson, and Merl Eppse wrote Black history textbooks, teacher guides, and other resources to correct white authors’ omissions and misrepresentations.

Black history education became more mainstream during the 1960s as Black children, parents, teachers, and community members protested for more Black history courses. These acts of agency led to more Black history courses and a handful of states creating legislation mandating Black history in public schools.

Despite its storied past, Black history education continues to have severe problems in the way it is conceived and taught. As prominent educator Gloria Ladson-Billings wrote in her 2003 Critical Race Theory: Perspectives on the Social Studies , when schoolchildren learn “Black history,” they learn that Black people “are relatively insignificant to the growth and development of our democracy and our nation, and they represent a drain on the resources and values.”

The first time many schoolchildren learn about Black people is through enslavement and other oppression-centered narratives. Black people are taught as passive people and disconnected from their liberation. The prevailing narrative emphasizes white saviors and the federal government as Black people’s primary liberators. When Black liberation is taught, “liberation” is limited to “nonviolence,” and historical narratives that state otherwise are vilified and compared to white supremacy. The stale K-12 Black history instruction rarely builds on itself; instead, the same context and content are regurgitated throughout students’ educational careers.

Black historical consciousness is a set of principles to understand, develop, and teach Black histories that recognize Black people's full humanity.

We can’t get Black history education right because we teach about Black history instead of through Black history. Teaching about Black history has meant that schools teach from how white people imagine Black histories. Teaching through Black history should mean listening, writing, and teaching narratives from the actual historical experiences and voices of Black people.

These historical perspectives differ significantly. For instance, teaching Brown v. Board of Education through Black voices would acknowledge that many Black communities were not in favor of integrating schools, just equity in school funding. Black schools were culturally confirming, relevant, and sustaining. Integration meant transferring Black students to predominately white schools where instructional practices were culturally insensitive and racist. Black schools were closed, and many Black teachers and administrators lost their jobs. Teaching through Black history about the Brown ruling provides a critical assessment of the policy and not the federal government’s moral prerogative of racial progress.

We can teach through Black history by adopting what I call Black historical consciousness. Black historical consciousness is a set of principles to understand, develop, and teach Black histories that recognize Black people’s full humanity and emphasize pedagogical practices that reimagine the legitimacy, selection, and interpretation of historical sources. This consciousness should be adopted for creating and sustaining Black history programs.

Black historical consciousness consists of six principles and ample examples, some of which may require further research even for history teachers:

1. Don’t ignore systemic power, oppression, and racism. We cannot teach about Black history without exploring how these forces have influenced Black life in America. Examples include the institution of slavery, the nadir of race relations, the wealth gap and housing patterns, the war on drugs, and mass incarceration.

2. Acknowledge Black agency. Black people have always acted independently, made their own decisions based on their interests, and fought back against oppression. Just because oppression has influenced Black life histories does not mean that oppression defines Black history. Examples include African resistance to slavery, Black abolitionists, the two Great Migrations, the NAACP and the courts, and the Black Power movement.

3. Study the similarities and differences of Black histories and cultures across Africa and the African Diaspora worldwide. Black history should begin with the study of ancient Africa and move to define Blackness worldwide. Examples include African origins of humanity, the Haitian Revolution, the Caribbean Black Power movement, and African civilization, kingdoms, and dynasties.

4. Focus on Black joy through liberation and radical projects that defied oppressive structures throughout history. Highlight histories about Black culture that are not focused on hardship but sustain Black people’s spirits. Examples include Black family dynamics, music, dance, cultural expressions, sports, holidays and traditions, and the Black Arts Movement.

5. Explore the multiple identities that can inform and intersect with Blackness. Examples include the Combahee River Collective, Black political thought, Black nationalism, and the experiences of Black Indigenous people, Black women, and Black LGBTQ+ communities.

6. Recognize that all Black histories are contentious. These histories are twofold. First, Black people are not a monolithic group and have had various and sometimes competing ideas on how to solve social issues. Examples include Black Marxism, the reparations movement, Pan-Africanist movements, and the Garvey movement. Second, like all histories, Black histories are not always positive and include unfavorable and problematic moments and narratives. Examples include recolonizing Africa, homophobia, and sexism during the civil rights movement.

If we continue to teach about Black history and not through it, we will perpetuate instructional practices that (intentionally or not) dehumanize Black people, emphasize white supremacy and anti-Blackness, and psychologically harm schoolchildren, especially Black children.

The reason why we cannot get Black history right is that we refuse to seriously listen to, understand, and interpret Black historical voices. We fail to listen to Black teachers and educators who have been telling us how to teach Black history for more than a century. We cling to historical fantasies and not historical truths from multiple perspectives.

Until we believe Black people are historical vessels, we will continue to suffer from anti-Blackness and an inequitable society that continue to relegate Black histories to the margins. The unbalanced Black histories we continue to propagate as “history” paint Black people as a problem in society and not a solution. Black historical consciousness holds the hope to transform history education and, in turn, society.

A version of this article appeared in the February 03, 2021 edition of Education Week as Black History Is About More Than Oppression

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Black History Month Research Project: A Step-by-Step Guide

Hello Teacher Friends! How is your 2022 going? For me, this year is just zipping by! I cannot believe it is nearly Black History Month already! Since February is so close, I wanted to take a quick minute and highlight one of my most popular resources in my TpT Store . My Black History Month Research Project is incredibly popular this time of year. This resource has helped literally hundreds of teachers and thousands of students learn the research process and commemorate important Black individuals! I’ve recently updated the entire product and wanted to break it down and show you how I use this resource in my classroom!

Black History Month Research Project

With this resource, each student will research an influential Black individual, write a biographical essay about their individual and create a visual representation of their person! While this sounds like a lot of work, I promise I have broken it down into manageable chunks for YOU and your students! Even students who struggle with reading and writing have succeeded with this project!

Phase 1: Building Research Skills

Before beginning, students need a research subject! Included in this resource is a list of over 140 Black individuals who have made significant contributions to society— including many influential women! Personally, I like to randomly assign names to students. (Actually, I usually have them pick a name out of a bowl.) I do this for a few reasons. First, I think there is value in learning about someone new that students maybe haven’t even heard of before. If given the choice, students often default to the Black figures they already know! I don’t want them to do that! Second, I like to have all my students in all my classes have different names. This way, when we display them in the hallway or classroom, we don’t have any duplicates!

After students have their research subject, it is time to learn how to research. Instead of setting my students loose on Google right away, I like to teach them the research process. This direct teaching does take a little bit of class time. However, it is totally worth it! Not only will your students’ end results be infinitely better, but they are learning foundational research skills. Research skills that they will use again and again throughout their educational careers!

In these lessons, students will learn about different types of sources, how to determine if a source is credible, and how to recognize an author’s bias.

I’ve included a “Source Credibility Checklist” for students to keep as a reference that will help them determine whether a source is a “good” source or not. I’ve also outlined a fun activity intentionally using a completely biased website! It’s a real eye-opening activity for students that shows them the need to use multiple sources and check for credibility.

Phase 2: Research & Note-taking

The next step in the Black History Month Research Project is to research! I have two Slides Presentations giving students tips for conducting thorough research and taking notes to keep track of the information they have gathered! Students can take notes on their KWL Chart. I’ve also included a Note-taking Graphic Organizer that helps students keep track of what information came from what source. Keeping track of their information will come in handy later when they create their bibliographies!

Phase 3: Writing Black History Month Research Project Essays

Following the research and note-taking process, it’s time for students to outline and draft their essays. I’ve included a suggested outline that students can use to organize their information. In the Slides, I show how to take the information from their outline and notes and turn it into paragraphs in their essays! In my class, we talk a lot about writing excellent paragraphs . Here is another resource that can help if your students are struggling with this basic building block of writing!

Also in this phase, students will work together to edit and revise one another’s essays. This collaborative process is a great way to teach students how to give and accept feedback. It is also helpful in learning how to improve one’s writing from the first draft to the published final copy!

Additionally, students will also practice citing their sources by creating a bibliography. At the middle school level, I don’t require my students to stick with MLA or Chicago styles or anything in particular. I’m most interested in them understanding that they should be giving credit to the original authors. I don’t worry too much about formatting it in a specific style. I’ve included a Simple Bibliography Guide for students to use!

Phase 4: Visual Display & Class Presentations

Finally, students will create a visual display of information for their person. There are endless options for this portion of the assignment. You could ask students to simply use a large sheet of paper, a poster board, etc. to create a visual by hand. Alternatively, I heard from one tech-savvy teacher who asked his students to create a Slide for their visual component. He compiled the Slides, set up a projector in the front of the school, and looped the Slides all throughout February to allow others in the school to learn from their research!

I generally stick with a low-tech option and use large sheets of paper (my school has 12×18 sheets of paper that seem to work well). Students include the the most important facts and information about their individual. I also ask them to include pictures and a quotation on their poster. When students have finished their essays and their posters, students present their Black History Month Research Projects to the class. Afterwards, I like to display the posters in the hallway outside my classroom to allow others to learn as well!

Phew! If that sounds overwhelming, don’t worry! I’ve got you covered! This resource includes over 120 Instructional Slide s that literally walk you through the entire process! Also, if you need any help along the way, I’m just an email away!

How do you like to commemorate Black History Month with your students? I’d love to hear your ideas!

Brenna (Mrs. Nelson)

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The Spectator

Personal Essays on Black History Month

In 1926, Carter G. Woodson, a Harvard-trained educator, working with the Association for the Study of Negro Life established Black History Week – an opportunity to honor the largely unknown contributions of those of African descent and to celebrate the essence of a history that is integral to the narrative of America as apple pie. Nearly 100 years later (92 to be exact), black history in the United States remains incomplete, inauthentic and lopsided. The dominant narrative reinforces negative stereotypes and assumptions that devalue black and brown bodies in America. We are familiar with the common threads – school-to-prison pipeline, mass incarceration, educational achievement gaps to name a few. We are less familiar with (or perhaps less willing to acknowledge) the systemic and structural forces that sustain and lock in advantage; a self-reinforcing system that has been operating for hundreds of years. Moreover, often we recycle our praise for those commonly-known historical figures in black history; leaving a vast delta of information about the unique contributions of black people across disciplines and genres hidden, unacknowledged or forgotten. As an African American woman living in this moment, the promise and peril of what civil rights leaders in the 1950s and 1960s referred to as “beloved community,” seems ever present. It is hard to remain hopeful in the midst of such palpable divisiveness, polarizing forces, coarse language and deeds that are antithetical to creating a society that is inclusive, loving and just. Those who fought, sacrificed, and died deserve our reverence and gratitude, for sure. Significantly, however, to honor the legacy of their contributions demands not only celebratory moments, but also recommitting ourselves to action toward building beloved community. Remembering the past is important to create pathways toward greater understanding, productive dialogue, cross-cultural trust and reconciliation. Discovering those core pieces of American history is vital to building these bridges. The Southern Poverty Law Center recently published a study reflecting our failure as a nation to adequately educate about the difficult and complex history of American slavery; treating slavery as an event rather than integral part of who we are as a country. We must honestly confront our shared history and its relationship to contemporary racial gaps and inequities. Any discussion toward building beloved community cannot take place without confronting the difficult history of American slavery because this history continues to shape our conceptions of race, who belongs and fairness. With Black History Month upon us, I’m mindful of the students, scholars, activists and ordinary citizens who found the courage to remain determined and engaged in the midst of great challenges, vulnerability and danger in order to demand basic human dignity and racial justice. In fact, it was college students and other young people who declared Black History as a month-long exploration rather than a week. Confining black history to a week or month is not the point. The heart of the matter for me is that context matters. This moment signifies our shared history—black history matters for all of us—the story of how America developed, prospered and created an imperfect union, one that continues to bear fruit in rich and complex ways. It’s about educating ourselves and discovering those foundational pieces and hard truths of American history like the enslavement of free people of African descent, genocidal acts like lynching, segregation and the discrimination of Jim Crow, along with the numerous contributions made by black people to the fabric of American life and culture, as well as its infrastructure and industrial capacity. We remember so others will not forget; to affirm and to build a better world. We cannot change that which we do not know and understand or for which we hold little or no respect and curiosity. This month and beyond, I will acknowledge with pride those whose efforts continue to inspire and make history—from the freedom fighters of the Civil Rights Movement (too numerous to name), the vibrancy of the Harlem Renaissance, Pauli Murray, Audre Lorde; to more contemporary history makers including Black Lives Matter, Colin Kaepernick, Ana Duvernay, Shonda Rhimes, Beyoncé, authors like Ibram Kendi and Isabel Wilkerson, Black Panther – the movie, to the official portraits of former President Obama and Michelle Obama, both created by black artists whose subjects and works will hang in the National Gallery for all time. Additionally, as CDO, I will continue to build our capacity to embed and infuse diversity, equity and inclusion throughout the strategic priorities of the institution and to cultivate more productive ways of engaging across differences. The goal is that SU is a place where we harness the power of our differences, embrace creative tension and grow together. I remain hopeful in the midst of challenging times because of the courageous citizens on this campus and beyond who are doing their part to build a more just and humane society—toward beloved community. – Natasha Martin Vice President for Diversity and Inclusion

I’m half Black, half Cuban. Growing up my father never spoke Spanish in the house and I never asked why. My father was a man that never saw color, he always believed you should “trust the soul of a man rather than the look of him.” (Remember the Titans–Coach Yoast). In Petersburg, Va., where I was born and raised, my father became the first Negro in the 60’s to drive a city bus. At the time this was unheard of. He battled his way through racism, and other challenges of negative behavior because he was the only black bus driver for Petersburg Va. Transit Co. (see cover photo). I can remember my mother telling me a story about father’s first week at work. She described it as “hell pure”. Your father pulls up and says, “good morning everyone.” The white passengers were furious and they would not board the bus. So, a group of blacks walked pass the group of white passengers and boarded the bus, deposited their fare and said, “good morning.” After a few minutes the white passengers began to board the bus. They shouted racial slurs, they spit on my father and other passengers and said “hey nigger whose bus did you steal?” as they walked passed him. On top of that, they didn’t pay their fare. When all the passengers got seated, my father put the bus in park and removed his seat belt and stood up. He wasn’t a small man. He stood tall at a height of 6ft 5inches. He began to speak to all the passengers on the bus. This is what he said, “I’m the bus driver and this my route, but if I’m the driver of this bus, you will not disrespect me, put your hands on me or spit on me. Lastly if you have a problem with what I said or I have offended you, you can just remove yourself from my bus.” He returned to his seat, fastened his seat belt, and put the bus in gear and started driving toward Downtown Petersburg. During the bus ride the atmosphere on the bus was so silent you could hear a pin drop. After about a 50-minute bus ride, the bus arrives in Downtown Petersburg. The bus comes to a stop and my father opens the door and all passengers began to exit. As white passengers walked past my father to exit the bus, they deposited their fare and shook my fathers hand and apologized to him and the last white passenger asked if they would we him see later that day, to which my father responded, “yes you will and I will get you home safe to your family.” Black History Month, to me, means a celebration of knowledge. It’s a reflection of the past, present and future in African American Culture. It’s a reminder of all the positive and innovative things that have come from our culture and how it made a huge impact on future generations. It is a time for everyone to experience culture and the roots of many things that have evolved from those of African American decent. Also it’s a time to inform everyone who may not be exposed to African American History the rest of the year. Let’s all take the time to remember the hardships and struggle, but it doesn’t stop there. It’s a remembrance of what we strive for and how the ones before us have paved a way for the things we have today. – Ricco Bland Public Safety Officer

My grandmother was the most influential person in my life until her death in 1997. Today, I draw inspiration both from her memory and the legacy of love and compassion she left behind. I experienced a safe, secure, loving childhood that occurred at the valuable intersection of two circumstances; the youth of my parents and the love of my grandmother. I was positioned to witness the broad range of painful human experiences and given a unique set of assets and blessings that allowed me the ability to develop and grow my understanding of the world I inhabit. Early in my upbringing, my grandmother introduced me to the writings of W.E.B. DuBois. And while I was not fully capable on my own of making sense of his writings as a youngster, the messages of his experiences spoke truth to my reality as I began to mature and grow in my understanding of the world around me. His words of the early 1900s still ring true for me today and underscore the significance of Black History Month in my life so I share them with you in that spirit. After the Egyptian and the Indian, the Greek and the Roman, the Teuton and the Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. (DuBois, 1903) Accordingly, Black History Month is less a month and more a movement that remains alive in me with each breath I take. It is represented in my family who gave me voice and liberated me from the poor rural up bringing that shackled so many before and after me. Black History Month is about deliverance, freedom, reframing experiences, renaming reality and retelling the truth. H. Alexander Welcome (2004) asserted: The life histories of Whites are used as the standard against which Blacks are encouraged to strive. The employment of this ontology fallaciously limits the range of Black agency, producing deceitful narratives where the navigation of the social environment by Blacks is dictated by either a passive response to, or a passive adoption of, White scripts. The utilization of whiteness to determine and/or evaluate blackness begins when whiteness and White life histories come to represent what is “right.” (p. 61) Black History is about transformation, consciousness, definition, and debunking myths and lies. It is represented in the narratives and oral histories of my ancestors told to me by my grandparents and parents and to be shared forward with my own children and the generations to come. It is about an increased understanding of the contributions of Black people throughout our muddled history. It is ultimately about truth and reconciliation. – Alvin Sturdivant Vice President, Student Development

Picture Detroit, Michigan in the 1970’s and you can begin to imagine my childhood. By the time I was ten years old, the mayor of Detroit was a black man, Coleman Young. The superintendent of public schools, Arthur Jefferson, was also a black man. I was blessed to grow up in times permeated by James Brown (“I’m black and I’m proud), the Black Panthers, dashikis, afro hair, and going every Sunday to Triedstone Baptist Church and later Detroit’s Afro-American Mission. In my memory, I hear people reminding me that the history of my race was something of which to be proud. Calendars my parents received from black businesses in town served as black history storybooks. (I honestly can’t remember if they were sent by funeral homes or insurance agencies.) Every year, we received a new calendar depicting black people succeeding in various fields such as Dorie Miller, a Navy gunner killed at Pearl Harbor and honored for his bravery, and Ida B. Wells, the journalist and sociologist who brought lynching into the national consciousness. Black history was not confined to a month at my public school. Yet, February afforded an opportunity for heightened reflections on what it meant to be black in America. Today, February still feels like a time to remember, to catch hold of the past and allow it to inspire me in the present. I recently joked with a friend that I should write a book titled “The Re-education of this Negro” as I have struggled with the times – police brutality against young black men and women, regular reminders of mass incarceration and injustice under the law. At times, the bleakness of the current day overwhelms me. I wish I could say that seeing all of the wrongs propels me toward solutions but at times I feel immobilized by the weight of racism. In contrast, it seems to me that Dr. Woodson called black people to have a knowledge of history because an understanding of the accomplishments of one’s forbears was essential to inspiration, aspiration, and justice. Increasingly, as I struggle with this present darkness I feel the need to draw on the dreams and victories of those who came before. I want to remember how they maintained faith and laughter as well as how tears and sorrow drove them forward. What’s black history month to me? It is both a call and a light. Black history month is the call of many voices saying “Remember. Press on.” Black history month is a light in the darkness that shows a way forward. Black history is about more than a month but this month reminds me to pause and locate myself within history. – Holly Slay Ferraro Associate Professor, Management

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56 African American History Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best african american history topic ideas & essay examples, 🔍 good essay topics on african american history, ✅ most interesting african american history topics to write about.

• African American History Timeline (1619 – 1865) As the expansion of the textile factories led irresistibly to a rise in the market for servitude Africans, there was a possibility of a slave insurrection, such as the one that prevailed in Haiti in […]
• African Americans: History and Modernity Most African Americans are descendants of enslaved people brought from Africa, and the research focuses on the connection between the current state of African Americans concerning their history. We will write a custom essay specifically for you by our professional experts 808 writers online Learn More
• History and True Meaning of African American Slave Music The ancestors of African Americans were forcibly separated from their homes and brought to the United States to work on the plantations of the Old South.
• The Series of Injustices Spanned the History of African Americans A series of failures for Americans began with the emergence of slavery in the USA. However, it is impossible to talk about the complete eradication of racism in the country.
• The African American History: The Historical Weight of 1776 A number of us, who arrived unexpectedly, became indentured to Virginia masters through a bidding process that was to some extent similar to later slave auctions that would become all in all widespread in the […]
• Lynching History of African Americans: An Absurd Illegal Justice System in the 19th Century Another attempt to explain the origin of lynch law is that of regulators and moderators. According to Rhodes, this theory is not applicable because the name of the law and order maintenance unit was aregulators’ […]
• African Americans Struggle Against Slavery The following paragraphs will explain in detail the two articles on slavery and the African American’s struggle to break away from the heavy and long bonds of slavery. The website tells me that Dredd Scott […]
• African American History: The Struggle for Freedom The history of the Jacksons Rainbow coalition shows the rise of the support of the African American politicians in the Democratic party.
• African American History in the 20th Century The NAACP was radical since it fought many legal battles and fought against ideologies of some of the most prominent African American leaders like those of the late Booker Washington and the government.
• African American History After Reconstruction The bureau also helped champion African Americans’ rights by pushing for the 14th and 15th amendments of the constitution that would give African Americans voting rights.
• King Jr. and Malcolm X in African American History Malcolm was able to sell his ideas to the African Americans in various meetings in the streets of Harlem and in major universities across the United States.
• Robert R. Moton’s Role in African American History In conclusion, this article has helped to get a better understanding of the topic and what events took place at that time.
• History of Higher Education for African Americans Even if I had the opportunity to participate in higher education, I could not have managed to take advantage of it since it was expensive, and I would have nothing to eat after school.
• African American History and Its Importance in Modern Days Without a clear understanding of this part of history, slavery would not have evolved to the current citizenship, freedom and human rights that we enjoy in our constitution.
• History of African Americans The readings that are going to be discussed in the paper tell the history of African Americans, their struggles for civil rights, and their integration into the social and political life of the country.
• Perspectives in African American History and Culture The point is that a person has both, mind and body, and if a person could not accept the idea of being enslaved, he/she was not a slave.
• The History of the Black Lives Matter Movement
• African American History: 1865 to the Present
• The Black History Month: The Importance of Black History
• Overview of African American History and Culture
• African American History: Religious Influences 1770 – 1831
• The Brief History of Black Nationalism
• Who Is Considered the Father of Black History
• African American History: Tribute to Sojourner Truth
• Ame and Ame Zion Churches in African American History
• Black Slaveowners in African American History
• Capitalism and Its Impact on African American History
• Education of All Perspectives of the African American History
• Changes Brewing for African American History
• Exploring African American History: The Harlem Renaissance
• Impact of the African American History on African Americans
• The Concept of Freedom in African American History
• How Does African American History Differ From Others
• African American History and “Warmth of Other Suns”
• How the 2008 Election Affected African American History
• Irene Gomez-Leon: African American History
• History of Black Wall Street ‘Little Africa’
• African American History Before 1877: Main Events and Figures
• Language Awareness: The N-Word in African American History
• Slavery and Its Significance in the African American History
• African American History During the Antebellum Period
• The Impact of the Civil War on African American History
• Analysis of Why African American History Is Important
• African American History Figure: Matthew Alexander Henson
• The Impact of Black Soldiers on American History
• The Origins and Importance of Black History Month
• Black Nationalism in African American History
• Analysis of Arguments Against Black History Month
• The Advantages and Disadvantages of Black History
• Brief History of Black Males in American Society
• Racism Enacted Throughout the History of Black Films
• The History of Harlem – Cultural Epicenter of America’s Black Community
• African American Youth and Their Lack of Interest in Black History Month
• Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times
• Underrated and Unwritten Black History Heroes: John Carlos and Tommie Smith
• The Connotation of African-American History and Black History
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Home — Essay Samples — History — African American History — Black History Month and Reasons To Celebrate It

Black History Month and Reasons to Celebrate It

• Categories: African American History Racial Discrimination

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Words: 383 |

Published: Jan 29, 2024

Words: 383 | Page: 1 | 2 min read

Table of contents

Historical context, commemorating achievements and contributions, promoting social justice and equality, educational significance.

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Celebrating black history 2024 – part 2.

Dear friends, this is the second re-sharing of a 19: This Month in Black History story Lisa Brock and I wrote in January 2021.

This story is about the Devine Nine – a nickname used to speak of the nine historically Black Greek Organizations originally created at a time in US history when higher education for Blacks was inhibited by racism & discrimination – this story, however, has a specific focus on sororities; you will see why. If interested in learning more, this short YouTube video will help you better understand the Devine Nine’s history. Please set aside your views of the current US administration and of Vice-President Kamala Harris herself, and read this story. It highlights the resilience of a people in this country, that despite all odds, have overcome and thrived.

Read the essay

19: This Month in Black History – Black Sororities: Sister-Leaders, and US Elections

‘Dimbulb’ Trump Torched After Rambling Attempt To Explain Gettysburg Goes Wrong

Overnight Editor, HuffPost

Donald Trump’s attempt to explain the Battle of Gettysburg took some strange verbal detours ― and his critics were quick to call him out over it.

“Gettysburg, what an unbelievable battle that was. The Battle of Gettysburg,” the former president said at a rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday. “What an unbelievable ― I mean, it was so much and so interesting, and so vicious and horrible, and so beautiful in so many different ways.”

Trump continued:

“Gettysburg. Wow. I go to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to look and to watch. And the statement of Robert E. Lee ― who’s no longer in favor, did you ever notice that? No longer in favor ― ‘Never fight uphill, me boys, never fight uphill.’ They were fighting uphill. He said, ‘Wow, that was a big mistake.’ He lost his great general, and they were fighting. ‘Never fight uphill, me boys!’ But it was too late.”

The ramble was made even more surreal when someone just over Trump’s left shoulder began making odd faces midway through:

Trump goes on a weird rant about the battle of Gettysburg and then notes of Robert E Lee that "he's no longer in favor. Did you ever notice that?" pic.twitter.com/hs9GjmCh6K — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 14, 2024

Trump has been prone to verbal gaffes , stumbles and miscues , especially lately .

But even critics on X, formerly Twitter, were left perplexed by his attempt to describe one of the most famous battles in American history:

This is the part where Trump does a mash-up of the Civil War and Pirates of the Caribbean. https://t.co/H8aszJvzwF — Heather Thomas (@HeatherThomasAF) April 14, 2024

Trump: "Gettysburg! Wow!" What a dimbulb. — Stephen King (@StephenKing) April 14, 2024

So @realDonaldTrump Gettysburg was "Beautiful" and "it represented such a big portion of the success of this country." Really? Oh and "Robert E. Lee is no longer in favor"! Do you know why he is no longer in favor? Because he was a damn insurrectionist! On June 7, 1865, Robert E.… https://t.co/VUxRNPfLjR — Michael Steele (@MichaelSteele) April 14, 2024

His utter stupidity has always amazed me more than his psychopathy. https://t.co/X3pU976ln6 — George Conway (@gtconway3d) April 14, 2024

Trump: Gettysburg, what an amazing, horrible, just incredible, classy, terrible thing, really beautiful. I kinda went there, but had the wrong address. Robert E Lee a war hero that wasn’t captured, loser on the hill, but we miss him, really a great guy, believe me https://t.co/CZ0ABdwk1s — Jared Moskowitz (@JaredEMoskowitz) April 14, 2024

Trump, in his bizarro history lesson, has Robert E. Lee saying to his troops "Never fight uphill, me boys," as if he was the Lucky Charms leprechaun. https://t.co/vpkYzPTUsI — James Surowiecki (@JamesSurowiecki) April 15, 2024

“I go to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to look and to watch” I wish more people would note how frequently Trump says simple sentences with simple words that are still so utterly crazy that no one in history has ever said them before https://t.co/5bqRXHuFhY — Roger Sollenberger (@SollenbergerRC) April 15, 2024

Trump just gave his own Gettysburg Address. It was incoherent. https://t.co/3G04VaIF3b — davidrlurie (@davidrlurie) April 14, 2024

The man's brain is mush. Imagine thinking this demented buffoon should become the president of the United States. https://t.co/y6FvYJdr4v — Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) April 14, 2024

If we asked Trump which General led Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, is there any chance he would give the right answer? — Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) April 14, 2024

Civil War historian here anyone who is a fan of the Confederate traitor and enslaver Robert E Lee should not ever be the President of the United States. https://t.co/SkcA8MoL2H — Manisha Sinha (@ProfMSinha) April 14, 2024

Guarantee this is the totality of what Trump knows about Gettysburg https://t.co/p6D2M48QWW — Greg Pinelo (@gregpinelo) April 14, 2024

“Never fight uphill, me boys.” Was Robert E Lee an Irish pirate? https://t.co/OVCxH0IuSD — Shannon Watts (@shannonrwatts) April 14, 2024

Trump is one of those idiots who asks Gettysburg park rangers if the monuments were there during the battle. — Bob Cesca (@bobcesca_go) April 14, 2024

Donald Trump always talks about history (or, well, *anything*) like a fourth-grader doing a book report on a book he didn’t read. — Mrs. Betty Bowers (@BettyBowers) April 14, 2024

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Black, 40 years old, previous stillbirth. Mom’s death from sepsis drives dad to push for customized pregnancy care

Clayton Anderson said despite suffering a prior stillbirth, his late wife Krystal Anderson received the same level of preventive care as a 23-year-old who's very healthy.

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Former Kansas City Chiefs cheerleader Krystal “Krissy” Anderson and her husband, Clayton Anderson, felt like they had finally received another chance to grow their family after they learned last November that she was pregnant again. Her pregnancy with baby James had ended in a stillbirth. But at age 40, Krystal was pregnant again.

Clayton told ABC News he saw their second chance for parenthood as a “little sign from” James. Despite the couple believing he was sending them a hopeful message, they had concerns. Krystal was Black. She was older. She’d lost a child before.

Just one of those factors was particularly risky, but the Andersons were navigating a frightening trifecta. So, they requested high-risk care from the onset, Clayton told ABC. But doctors told the couple they would have to wait until Krystal was three and a half months pregnant, he said, as you “can’t start a plan with maternal-fetal medicine or the high-risk maternity doctors until you get to week 14.”

“All pregnancy is high risk, especially, moreso, when you’re a woman of color, or you’re older,” Clayton contended, “and they should be treated that way from the start.”

Krystal died March 20, four weeks short of getting the specialized care she and her husband wanted. Unfortunately, the outcome for Krystal is the same for many Black mothers, who are at least three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications when compared to white women. Charlotte Willow, the Andersons’ daughter, died four days before her mother. And like her, Charlotte became another tragic data point that shows that Black babies — even those from wealthy moms — die at a higher rate than those born to poor white mothers. 

The Black community is familiar with well-known and well-off Black mothers having to fight for themselves to receive appropriate care during pregnancy and after delivery. Tennis champion Serena Williams had to advocate for herself after several blood clots developed in her lungs following the birth of her first daughter, Alexis Olympia, via C-section in 2017. Four years prior, actress Kyla Pratt had experience with a dismissive care provider who initially ignored her contraction concerns when she was giving birth to her second child.

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Clayton Anderson is now speaking out against “one-size-fits-all” prenatal care in honor of his late wife, who, at 40, was of advanced maternal age and automatically more at risk for pregnancy complications.

In December, a month after learning about her pregnancy, Krystal had a miscarriage scare. In the 16th week, she underwent a cerclage operation to ensure her cervix would remain viable for the rest of the pregnancy. Her next doctor’s visit was scheduled for week 20.

“Expecting somebody who’s had a loss to go four weeks in between seeing their care providers … That’s the same protocol that’s done for a 23-year-old that’s very healthy,” said Clayton. “It can’t be a one-size-fits-all.”

After complications in March, doctors made plans to admit his wife into a specialized hospital unit that could handle a periviable birth if she lasted to 22 weeks. During her week 20 visit, Clayton said doctors began prescribing semi-bedrest for two weeks to help her reach that point.

On Saturday, March 16, still in week 20, Krystal began experiencing back pains, which her OB doctor suggested could be a sign of contractions and dehydration. After running tests, Clayton said doctors discovered amniotic fluid and eventually stopped detecting a heartbeat in the fetus.

Krystal underwent surgery the following morning and returned on a ventilator and dialysis machine, experiencing kidney, liver and lung failure. She died within days.

The Mayo Clinic defines sepsis as “a serious condition in which the body responds improperly to an infection.” According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , sepsis affects 1.7 million adults in the U.S. each year, resulting in nearly 270,000 deaths annually.

Medical journal Healthcare , published in the National Library of Medicine, asserts that Black and Hispanic communities have higher morbidity and mortality rates in sepsis than the white population. While systemic bias against minority groups are often to blame for the disparities, the journal noted that “a growing body of literature has found patient, community, and hospital-based factors to be driving racial differences.”

According to ABC News, AdventHealth Shawnee Mission declined to provide specific details surrounding Krystal Anderson’s care due to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, but the hospital sent condolences to the family.

“Our hearts are hurting in this tragic situation,” they said in a statement, ABC reported. “We, along with the independent providers who deliver care in our facilities, strive to provide the best possible care to every patient based on their specific needs and circumstances. We extend our prayers and support to family members and loved ones experiencing the devastating loss of precious life.”

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What Solar Eclipse-Gazing Has Looked Like for the Past 2 Centuries

Millions of people on Monday will continue the tradition of experiencing and capturing solar eclipses, a pursuit that has spawned a lot of unusual gear.

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By Sarah Eckinger

• April 8, 2024

For centuries, people have been clamoring to glimpse solar eclipses. From astronomers with custom-built photographic equipment to groups huddled together with special glasses, this spectacle has captivated the human imagination.

Creating a Permanent Record

In 1860, Warren de la Rue captured what many sources describe as the first photograph of a total solar eclipse . He took it in Rivabellosa, Spain, with an instrument known as the Kew Photoheliograph . This combination of a telescope and camera was specifically built to photograph the sun.

Forty years later, Nevil Maskelyne, a magician and an astronomy enthusiast, filmed a total solar eclipse in North Carolina. The footage was lost, however, and only released in 2019 after it was rediscovered in the Royal Astronomical Society’s archives.

Telescopic Vision

For scientists and astronomers, eclipses provide an opportunity not only to view the moon’s umbra and gaze at the sun’s corona, but also to make observations that further their studies. Many observatories, or friendly neighbors with a telescope, also make their instruments available to the public during eclipses.

Fredrik Hjalmar Johansen, Fridtjof Nansen and Sigurd Scott Hansen observing a solar eclipse while on a polar expedition in 1894 .

Women from Wellesley College in Massachusetts and their professor tested out equipment ahead of their eclipse trip (to “catch old Sol in the act,” as the original New York Times article phrased it) to New London, Conn., in 1922.

A group from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania traveled to Yerbaniz, Mexico, in 1923, with telescopes and a 65-foot camera to observe the sun’s corona .

Dr. J.J. Nassau, director of the Warner and Swasey Observatory at Case School of Applied Science in Cleveland, prepared to head to Douglas Hill, Maine, to study an eclipse in 1932. An entire freight car was required to transport the institution’s equipment.

Visitors viewed a solar eclipse at an observatory in Berlin in the mid-1930s.

A family set up two telescopes in Bar Harbor, Maine, in 1963. The two children placed stones on the base to help steady them.

An astronomer examined equipment for an eclipse in a desert in Mauritania in June 1973. We credit the hot climate for his choice in outfit.

Indirect Light

If you see people on Monday sprinting to your local park clutching pieces of paper, or with a cardboard box of their head, they are probably planning to reflect or project images of the solar eclipse onto a surface.

Cynthia Goulakos demonstrated a safe way to view a solar eclipse , with two pieces of cardboard to create a reflection of the shadowed sun, in Lowell, Mass., in 1970.

Another popular option is to create a pinhole camera. This woman did so in Central Park in 1963 by using a paper cup with a small hole in the bottom and a twin-lens reflex camera.

Amateur astronomers viewed a partial eclipse, projected from a telescope onto a screen, from atop the Empire State Building in 1967 .

Back in Central Park, in 1970, Irving Schwartz and his wife reflected an eclipse onto a piece of paper by holding binoculars on the edge of a garbage basket.

Children in Denver in 1979 used cardboard viewing boxes and pieces of paper with small pinholes to view projections of a partial eclipse.

A crowd gathered around a basin of water dyed with dark ink, waiting for the reflection of a solar eclipse to appear, in Hanoi, Vietnam, in 1995.

Staring at the Sun (or, How Not to Burn Your Retinas)

Eclipse-gazers have used different methods to protect their eyes throughout the years, some safer than others .

In 1927, women gathered at a window in a building in London to watch a total eclipse through smoked glass. This was popularized in France in the 1700s , but fell out of favor when physicians began writing papers on children whose vision was damaged.

Another trend was to use a strip of exposed photographic film, as seen below in Sydney, Australia, in 1948 and in Turkana, Kenya, in 1963. This method, which was even suggested by The Times in 1979 , has since been declared unsafe.

Solar eclipse glasses are a popular and safe way to view the event ( if you use models compliant with international safety standards ). Over the years there have been various styles, including these large hand-held options found in West Palm Beach, Fla., in 1979.

Parents and children watched a partial eclipse through their eclipse glasses in Tokyo in 1981.

Slimmer, more colorful options were used in Nabusimake, Colombia, in 1998.

In France in 1999.

And in Iran and England in 1999.

And the best way to see the eclipse? With family and friends at a watch party, like this one in Isalo National Park in Madagascar in 2001.