Black History

Nobody Alive Today Owned American Slaves Let us begin with something that ought to be simple enough for everybody to understand. Nobody alive today personally owned enslaved people in the United States before slavery was abolished in 1865. A white person living today is not personally guilty for something done by somebody who lived generations

When Reading Was Considered Dangerous There is something powerful about remembering that there was a time in America when teaching an enslaved Black person to read could bring punishment. South Carolina’s 1740 Negro Act placed severe restrictions on enslaved people after the Stono Rebellion, and literacy became part of the larger struggle over control. Other

What the Citigroup Study Was Really Saying A 2020 Citigroup study estimated that racial inequality affecting Black Americans had cost the United States economy about $16 trillion over the previous twenty years. That number has been circulating again, but people sometimes describe it in a way that changes what the study actually argued. Citigroup was

The Man Who Heard Africa in the Language I recently found myself thinking about Lorenzo Dow Turner, a scholar whose work helped change the way people understood the Gullah language. Turner was not Gullah Geechee himself, but he listened closely enough to hear what other scholars had overlooked. While teaching at what is now South

Two Images of the Same Uniform When most Americans think about firefighters, they think about courage and sacrifice. We picture them running into burning buildings to save lives while everyone else is trying to get out. We remember September 11 and those firefighters climbing the stairs of the World Trade Center while frightened people were

What Happened After Greenwood Burned When we talk about Tulsa’s Greenwood District, the story should not end with the flames of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. Lives were taken, homes were destroyed, businesses disappeared, and generations of wealth were damaged. But something else happened that deserves just as much attention. Black folks started rebuilding Greenwood

More Than a Name The debate over whether descendants of enslaved Black Americans should call ourselves African American reaches deeper than a name. I understand why some Black folks question the label when we cannot point to a particular African village, family, or ethnic group and say with certainty, “That is where my people came

Before Sidney Poitier Before Sidney Poitier became the Black leading man most of America remembers, James Edwards was already pushing against Hollywood’s racial boundaries. Edwards came along in the late 1940s, when Black actors were still commonly cast as servants, porters, entertainers, or comic relief. He brought something different to the screen because he could

The Death of a Visionary When John H. Johnson died on August 8, 2005, at eighty-seven, Black America lost more than a successful businessman. We lost a man who had spent more than sixty years proving that Black stories, Black consumers, and Black achievement mattered. Through Ebony and Jet, Johnson Publishing Company became one of