Before Sarah Neely’s Story Can Be Told Before I tell you what happened to Sarah Neely, a Black woman caught inside a system that claimed to recognize her freedom, I need to give you some historical context. That context is crucial because her story makes little sense unless we first understand how the law worked
When the Law Became the Lie: Before I Tell You What Happened to Sarah Neely Read More »
A Summons She Did Not Expect In 1939, Jane Matilda Bolin was a 31-year-old Black attorney building her career in New York City. One day, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia summoned her to meet him at the New York World’s Fair. She reportedly had no idea why the mayor wanted to see her. Bolin was concerned
Judge Jane Bolin: The Black Woman Who Took Her Seat When America Said She Did Not Belong Read More »
Racism Does Not Always Wear the Same Face One of the difficult truths about racism is that it does not always come from the same place. Some people knowingly embrace racist beliefs because those beliefs are exactly what they want to hold. They may have inherited prejudice from their families, communities, or culture and decided
When Racism Comes From Hatred and When It Comes From Ignorance Read More »
A Story That Refused to Die There is a story Black people have carried for generations about Africans who could fly. Not flying as a simple figure of speech, but rising from the ground and returning across the water to Africa. Versions of this story appear in different parts of the African diaspora. The details
Our People Gave Them Wings: Igbo Landing and the Legend of the Flying Africans Read More »
The Question We Are Sometimes Afraid to Ask Why are so many Black Americans still Christian? That is a fair historical question, especially when Christianity is often discussed alongside slavery and European colonialism. Some slaveholders and ministers used Christian teaching to encourage obedience and protect the social order. That history is real and should not
Did Black Americans Inherit Christianity—or Remake It? Read More »
The Messages Can Begin Before We Understand Them A Black child can enter the world before having any idea what race means. Yet society may already have meanings waiting for that child’s skin. Long before the child understands those messages, other people may have already attached assumptions to Blackness. Some of those assumptions have been
When Racism Gets Inside the Mind: Anti-Blackness and the Black Psyche Read More »
When Anger Becomes a Question There are moments when Black Americans see another violent death, another disturbing attack, or another court decision and ask how much more we are expected to take. That frustration did not begin yesterday. Our history contains too many examples of racial violence for a new incident to exist completely by
When Black America Demands Justice: Turning Anger Into Power Read More »
The Number That Stopped Me There is something about H.R. 40 that I did not fully understand until I looked more carefully at what the legislation actually proposes. H.R. 40 is not a bill ordering the federal government to start mailing reparations checks to Black folks. It does not establish a dollar amount for every
H.R. 40: How Long Does America Need to Study Reparations? Read More »
A Word I Thought I Already Knew For most of my life, if somebody said the word bulldozer, I pictured a large piece of construction equipment. I saw a heavy tractor with a broad steel blade pushing dirt, rocks, trees, and almost anything else standing in its way. The meaning seemed obvious. A bulldozer was
Before the Bulldozer Was a Machine: A Word Born in the Violence of Reconstruction Read More »
The History Is Older, but It Is Also More Complicated When I was first taught about racism in America, slavery often appeared to be the beginning of the story. Africans were brought to America, white people enslaved them, and racism developed to justify what had been done. There is truth in part of that explanation,
Before American Slavery: How Anti-Blackness Became a Racial System Read More »