Two Native American Women Break Political Barriers This Election

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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

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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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November 4, 2026

Emily Cochrane, The New York Times

Two Native American women made history in the midterm elections: Deb Haaland, a New Mexico Democrat, will be the nation’s first woman Native American governor, and Peggy Flanagan, a Democrat of Minnesota, is the first Native American woman to win election to the Senate.

This week’s victories were the latest in a string of political accomplishments for Native women in the United States. Ms. Haaland, a member of the Laguna Pueblo, has been at the forefront of those milestones: In 2018, she was one of two Native American women elected to the U.S. House, and under the Biden administration, she was confirmed as the first Native American cabinet secretary, overseeing the Interior Department.

History in the making, read all about Haaland and Flanagan the first Native American women elected to office

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