The Road to Reparations Through Black Genealogy

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An NAACP flyer campaigning for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives in 1922, but was filibustered to defeat in the Senate. Dyer, the NAACP, and freedom fighters around the country, like Flossie Baily, struggled for years to get the Dyer and other anti-lynching bills passed, to no avail. Today there is still no U.S. law specifically against lynching. In 2005, eighty of the 100 U.S. Senators voted for a resolution to apologize to victims' families and the country for their failure to outlaw lynching. Courtesy of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Some Exhibits to Come – One Hundred Years of Jim Crow

Bibliography – One Hundred Years Of Jim Crow

Claude, age 23, just months before his 1930 murder. Courtesy of Faith Deeter.

Freedom’s Heroes During Jim Crow: Flossie Bailey and the Deeters

Souvenir Portrait of the Lynching of Abram Smith and Thomas Shipp, August 7, 1930, by studio photographer Lawrence Beitler. Courtesy of the Indiana Hisorical Society.

An Iconic Lynching in the North

Claxton Dekle – Prosperous Farmer, Husband & Father of Two

Ancient manuscripts about mathematics and astronomy from Timbuktu, Mali

Some Exhibits to Come – African Peoples Before Captivity

Shackles for Adults & Children from the Henrietta Marie

Some Exhibits to Come – The Middle Passage

What I Saw Aboard a Slave Ship in 1829

Life After Hate: A Former White Power Leader Redeems Himself

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December 11, 2020

Alex Trapps-Chabala (Courtesy of Alex Trapps-Chabala)

By Pendarvis Harshaw, KQED

Alex Trapps-Chabala is a young genealogist whose main focus is tracing the lineage of African American people.

He grew up between East Sacramento and the Bay Area. But as preteen, his family sent him to live with with relatives in Alabama to get some discipline for an attitude problem. It was that time spent in the south that pushed Alex toward becoming a genealogist.

Alex says that while in Alabama, his grandmother taught him about his family and showed him how to dig through archives and records in order to uncover more information.

As he got more invested in genealogy, he saw gaps in how African American history is told, as well as opportunities to illuminate more Black family histories.

Alex began pulling up vital records, census records and even digitizing records of home births. With the help of others in his field, Alex is compiling a database he hopes will be a resource for African American families.

Now through his startup, The KinConnector, Alex is aiming to have an easy to use database that fills voids in African American histories…

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