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Hattie McDaniel with a row of Oscar Awards

Mammy and the Femme Fatale: Hattie McDaniel, Dorothy Dandridge, and the Black Female Standard

Black femininity was always considered a hard sell in Hollywood, but Hattie McDaniels and Dorothy became the perfect women to peddle racist stereotypes.
by Lynda Cowell via Girls On Tops on July 20, 2022
A man adjusts a protest sign at the base of the Confederate memorial known as the “Lost Cause” in Decatur, Ga.
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Removing Lost Cause Monuments Is The First Step in Dismantling White Supremacy

African American activists have long coupled these efforts with fighting against racist laws and racial violence.
by Ashleigh Lawrence-Sanders via Made By History on June 19, 2020

The Echoes of America's 'Faithful Slave' Trope in Lola's Story

How Alex Tizon’s essay echoes a trope with deep roots in American history
by Micki McElya via The Atlantic on May 31, 2017
Film still of Hattie McDaniel as Mammy in "Gone with the Wind."

The Mammy Washington Almost Had

In 1923, the U.S. Senate approved a new monument in D.C. "in memory of the faithful slave mammies of the South."
by Tony Horwitz via The Atlantic on May 31, 2013

Serena Williams and 'Angry Black Women'

A racial stereotype rears its ugly head.
by Ritu Prasad via BBC News on September 11, 2018
Photo of pop singer Erykah Badu, a black woman wearing a headwrap, singing into microphone.

The Radical History of the Headwrap

Born into slavery, then reclaimed by black women, the headwrap is now a celebrated expression of style and identity.
by Khanya Mtshali via Timeline on May 10, 2018

How Theaters and TV Networks are Changing the Way They Show Gone With the Wind

After almost 80 years, America is finally rethinking how it screens its favorite movie.
by Aisha Harris via Slate on October 22, 2017

The Pernicious Myth of the ‘Loyal Slave’ Lives on in Confederate Memorials

Statues don’t need to venerate military leaders of the Civil War to promulgate false narratives.
by Kevin M. Levin via Smithsonian on August 17, 2017
Jim Crow-era postcard with illustration of a black boy in the jaws of an alligator

How America Bought and Sold Racism, and Why It Still Matters

Today, very few white Americans openly celebrate the horrors of black enslavement—most refuse to recognize the brutal nature of the institution or activ...
by Lisa Hix via Collectors Weekly on November 10, 2015
Painting of Hannah.

Hannah, Andrew Jackson’s Slave

A favorite of Old Hickory, she made him seem kinder than he was. Why?
by Mark R. Cheathem via Humanities on March 10, 2014
Wet-nurse strike in Chicago, 1937.

No Money, No Milk

Black wet nurses made a show of militance in 1937.
by Dana Frank via Hammer & Hope on July 23, 2024
Ella Watson in American Gothic, photographed by Gordon Parks.

She Was No ‘Mammy’

Gordon Parks’s most famous photograph, "American Gothic," was of a cleaning woman in Washington, D.C. She has a story to tell.
by Salamishah Tillet via The Atlantic on May 8, 2024
Black mother holding baby

The Persistent Joy of Black Mothers

Characterized throughout American history as symbols of crisis, trauma, and grief, these women reject those narratives through world-making of their own.
by Leah Wright Rigueur via The Atlantic on August 11, 2021
Public art featuring silhouettes of enslaved people.

What Do We Want History to Do to Us?

Zadie Smith on Kara Walker, blackness and public art.
by Zadie Smith via New York Review of Books on February 6, 2020
Cover of "Making Whiteness," featuring a Black man in front of a billboard of larger-than-life white faces.
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Making Whiteness

How a historian's family history informed her professional quest to unpack the stories white Southerners told about themselves.
by In Black America via American Archive of Public Broadcasting on September 1, 1998

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