Posts by dr_fran
Lett’s Stand Against Debt Peonage Cost His Life
A genealogist, teacher, and writer from Alabama became interested in Lett’s story when teaching middle school students genealogy, ELA, and social studies. She took them on a field trip to EJI’s Lynching Memorial, where they saw Oliver Lett’s name and realized that he was an ancestor of many of her students.
Read MoreSecrets of Harriet Tubman’s life are being revealed 100 years later
More than a century after her death, historians are still unraveling the secrets of her life. This month the nation celebrates Harriet Tubman’s bicentennial and the fifth anniversary of the two national parks named after her. From film screenings and historical lectures to art exhibits and monument installations, here’s how you can uncover the mystery that shrouds Tubman’s life and honor the legacy of a woman who inspired generations.
Read MoreAmerica’s Black Holocaust Museum’s Grand Reopening Was a Celebration
Despite piles of snow, over 800 people attended the joyous ribbon-cutting, program, and free visits to celebrate the Grand Re-emergence of America’s Black Holocaust Museum, shuttered since summer 2008. Founded by a 74-year-old lynching survivor and scholar-activist, Dr. James Cameron, ABHM shares the 400+ year experiences of the descendants of Africa in America from captivity to today.
Read MoreJoin Us on February 25th for ABHM’s Ribbon-Cutting and Celebration!
It’s been 14 years since ABHM closed its doors – but finally, thanks to the hard work and dedication of a small group of community volunteers and staff, a very generous anonymous donor and many other individual donors, Alderwoman Milele Coggs and developer Melissa Goins, the physical museum has been reborn!
Read MoreMiami Dolphins head coach Mike McDaniel ought to know why he’s being asked about race
Miami Dolphins head coach Mike McDaniel, hired by a team that’s been accused of discriminating against Black men, doesn’t describe himself as Black even though, according to the American rules of race, he is. McDaniel was born in the United States to a white mother and a Black father, which, according to the way race is understood here, makes him Black. That means that the National Football League can conceivably use his hiring as a kind of rebuttal to Brian Flores, the head coach the Dolphins just fired.
Read More10 Black Women Innovators and the Awesome Things They Brought Us
From a better hairbrush to modern 3D technology, ten things that might never have existed without the invention or innovation of black women.
Read MoreBlack History Can Do More Than Counter White Racism
Black history is a movement of ideas targeted to redress the long history of anti-Blackness. Anti-Blackness is a totalizing system of thought that positions Black people, including their bodies, culture, and value systems, as bad or dysfunctional. But Black history does more than counter anti-Black ideologies; it also documents the social contexts, experiences, aesthetics, and intellectual pursuits of African Americans. This idea of both countering white racism and writing and creating from one’s standpoint—removed from the white gaze—is central to Black history.
Read MoreWe Still Can’t See American Slavery for What It Was
What is known about the Trans-Atlantic slave trade? We know a great deal about the scale of human trafficking across the Atlantic Ocean and about the people aboard each ship. Much of that research is available to the public in the form of the SlaveVoyages database. A detailed repository of information on individual ships, individual voyages and even individual people, it is a groundbreaking tool for scholars of slavery, the slave trade and the Atlantic world. And it continues to grow. Last year, the team behind SlaveVoyages introduced a new data set with information.
Read MoreThe Last Slave Ship review: the Clotilda, Africatown and a lasting American injustice
Ben Raines’s perceptive new book, The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning, is a welcome and affecting history lesson.
This story from long ago puts into context what the new spate of lawlessness in the US is all about. Raines tells a tale of racism and greed. Anyone who imagines that attempting to circumvent democracy is a new thing has forgotten the civil war.
Read MoreEighty years late: groundbreaking work on slave economy is finally published in UK?
In 1938, a brilliant young Black scholar at Oxford University wrote a thesis on the economic history of British empire and challenged a claim about slavery that had been defining Britain’s role in the world for more than a century.Slavery, Williams argues, was abolished in much of the British empire in 1833 because doing so at that time was in Britain’s economic self-interest – not because the British suddenly discovered a conscience.“ The capitalists had first encouraged West Indian slavery and then helped to destroy it,” he writes.
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