Black History

The Question Behind the Question When people say Black Americans seemed to have stronger businesses and institutions during segregation, there is some history behind what they are noticing, but we have to be careful about the conclusion we draw from it. Segregation itself was never some hidden blessing for Black folks. It was a deliberate

The Law That Followed Freedom North The Christiana Resistance of September 11, 1851, cannot be fully understood without first understanding the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Congress had strengthened federal procedures allowing people accused of escaping slavery to be captured even after reaching states where slavery itself was illegal. That meant crossing into Pennsylvania did

A Question Worth Asking Ask somebody to name five white Americans who seriously opposed slavery or racial injustice, and there is a good chance the list will get short pretty fast. Abraham Lincoln usually comes first, and somebody who knows a little more history may mention John Brown. After those names, however, the room can

Fourteen People in the Room Imagine shrinking the United States down to a room containing one hundred people and seeing roughly fourteen Black Americans standing among them. The exact number changes depending on the year, Census definitions, and how race and Hispanic origin are counted, so the image is meant to make a larger point

The Claim That “White People Did Not Exist” The statement that “white people did not exist before 1681” will certainly get people’s attention, but history requires a little more care than that. People whom Americans would classify as white today obviously lived long before the seventeenth century. English, Irish, Scottish, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and

When Familiar Phrases Change Language does not stay frozen simply because folks have been repeating the same expression for generations. Words and sayings can take on new meanings as people begin looking more carefully at the assumptions hiding underneath them. Linguists often describe changes in meaning as semantic change or semantic shift, although not every

We Have Always Known How to Build Building was never the hard part for Black people in America, even when the country put obstacle after obstacle in the way. We built businesses, churches, schools, newspapers, farms, banks, insurance companies, neighborhoods, and professional organizations when many doors were deliberately closed to us. Madam C. J. Walker

Trauma Is More Than a Memory Trauma does not live only in our memories or in stories we tell about what happened. The body can carry the effects of prolonged fear, violence, poverty, discrimination, and uncertainty. When danger becomes constant, the nervous system can remain on alert even when no immediate threat is standing in

The Idea of Trauma in the Bloodline When people say trauma runs in the bloodline, they are usually trying to explain why pain can seem to travel through a family for generations. Black families have understood that feeling long before anybody started using words like epigenetics. Slavery, family separation, racial violence, segregation, housing discrimination, and