The growing movement to save Black cemeteries

Greenwood Cemetery was the first commercial cemetery serving the black community in St. Louis. But without dedicated caretakers, it fell into neglect and attracted vandals. The Greenwood Cemetery Preservation Association has taken up the cause, like similar organizations around the nation, of preserving these pieces of history.

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Black 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.

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Family trees fill in the gaps for Black people seeking their ancestral roots

By Curtis Bunn, NBC News Black people have been able to connect with the past and give new agency to their identities through building family trees and researching their family histories. Growing up in Philadelphia, Amber Jackson said she knew so little of her history that she felt disconnected from who she was.  “They didn’t…

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We 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.

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Ida B. Wells, Black journalist and suffragist, honored with new Barbie doll

By Adela Suliman, Washington Post Black American journalist, suffragist and anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells will have her likeness transformed into a Barbie doll to honor her historic achievements. Wells, who was born into slavery in Mississippi in 1862 during the Civil War, went on to break boundaries as a prominent suffragist fighting to expand…

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