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respectability politics

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Martin Luther King Jr. with other activists and children.

Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Perilous Power of Respectability

We revere the man and revile the strategy, but King knew what he was doing.
by Kelefa Sanneh via The New Yorker on May 8, 2023
Anti-lynching protest outside White House

We See You, Race Women

We must dive deeper into the intellectual artifacts of black women thinkers to support the evolution of black feminist discourse and political action.
by Nicole A. Spigner via Public Books on June 5, 2018
Freedom's Journal front page, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 16, 1827

The First African American Newspaper Appears, 1827

A letter from the creators of Freedom's Journal to their initial patrons.
by Samuel Cornish, John Brown Russwurm via Freedom's Journal on March 16, 1827
African American baseball team photo.

How Baseball Shaped Black Communities in Reconstruction-Era America

On the early history of Black participation in America's pastime.
by Gerald Early via Literary Hub on May 1, 2025
Richard Pryor.

Understanding Richard Pryor's Use of the N-Word

Pryor's use of the word represented something valiant.
by Mark Anthony Neal via NewBlackMan (in Exile) on December 1, 2024
Skeletons in a museum posed with varying postures, as if they are performing different tasks.

Why Americans Are Obsessed With Poor Posture

The 20th-century movement to fix slouching questions the moral and political dimensions of addressing bad backs over wider public health concerns.
by Zoe Adams via The Nation on November 20, 2024
A photograph of the massive AIDS memorial quilt with the Washington Monument in the background.

“I Am the Face of AIDS”

Ryan White helped challenge existing understandings of the AIDS epidemic. But his story also reinforced arbitrary divisions between the guilty and the innocent.
by Paul M. Renfro via Public Books on October 22, 2024
C. G. Garrett photographed with five Black contemporaries outside of a building in Columbia, South Carolina.

Riding With Mr. Washington

How my great-grandfather invented himself at the end of Reconstruction.
by David Nicholson via The American Scholar on August 22, 2024
Mead reading a book, against a psychedelic background.

One of Our Most Respected 20th-Century Scientists Was LSD-Curious. What Happened?

A document in her papers in the Library of Congress sheds new light on postwar research on psychedelics.
by Benjamin Breen via Slate on February 10, 2024
Nicki Minaj and the autobiography of Malcolm X written by Alex Haley.

It’s Bigger Than Hip-Hop

We cannot understand the last fifty years of U.S. history—certainly not the first thing about Black history—without studying the emergence and evolution of rap.
by Austin McCoy via The Baffler on January 9, 2024
Black and white photo of two African American men standing in front of March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom sign.

The Obamas’ “Rustin”: Fun Tricks You Can Do on the Past

The project of “reclamation and celebration” proceeds from an impulse to rediscover black Greats who by force of their own will make “change.”
by Adolph Reed, Jr. via Nonsite on December 16, 2023
A Newton's Cradle where a black ball prepares to swing into 4 white ones.

Black Success, White Backlash

Black prosperity has provoked white resentment that has led to the undoing of policies that have nurtured Black advancement.
by Elijah Anderson via The Atlantic on October 16, 2023
Self-Portrait, by Samuel Joseph Brown Jr., a painting of a Black man looking at a portrait of himself.

A Right to Paint Us Whole

W.E.B. Du Bois’ message to African American artists.
by Melvin L. Rogers via Lapham’s Quarterly on October 4, 2023
Women at National Organization for Women demonstration

Betty Friedan and the Movement That Outgrew Her

Friedan was indispensable to second-wave feminism. And yet she was difficult to like.
by Moira Donegan via The New Yorker on September 11, 2023
Black worker holding a bundle of metal rods.

'Working Class' Does Not Equal 'White'

What it means to be a Black worker in the time since slavery.
by Ibram X. Kendi, Blair LM Kelley via The Atlantic on August 7, 2023
Native American and Black girls tossing around a medicine ball in a circle.

Right Living, Right Acting, and Right Thinking

How Black women used exercise to achieve civic goals in the late nineteenth century.
by Ava Purkiss via Lapham’s Quarterly on April 17, 2023
A naked David Opal signaling a peace sign with his hands on a TV screen in front of a background of a 1970s themed living room.

What Became of the Oscar Streaker?

After Robert Opel dashed naked across the stage in 1974, he ran for President and settled into the gay leather scene.
by Michael Schulman via The New Yorker on January 30, 2023
Cartoon illustration featuring Pauline Hopkins (center), Booker T. Washington (left), and John C. Freund (right)

Contending Forces

Pauline Hopkins, Booker T. Washington, and the Fight for The Colored American Magazine.
by Tarisai Ngangura via The Believer on March 29, 2022
Black and white photograph of Lorraine Hansberry smoking a cigarette.

The Many Visions of Lorraine Hansberry

She’s been canonized as a hero of both mainstream literature and radical politics. Who was she really?
by Blair McClendon via The New Yorker on January 17, 2022
White police officers arresting Black children, 1963

Rescuing MLK and His Children's Crusade

A new book traces the tactics of groundbreaking lawyer Constance Baker Motley amid pivotal protests in Birmingham.
by Tomiko Brown-Nagin via Harvard Gazette on January 13, 2022
Don Cornelius and the Soul Train Dancers on the dance floor, with fist raised in the Black Power salute, at the end of a show.

Soul Train and the Desire for Black Power

Don Cornelius had faith that Black culture would attract a mass audience, and a belief that Black culture should be in the hands of Black people.
by Mark Anthony Neal via The Nation on December 22, 2021
Marian Anderson looking downwards

Marian Anderson’s Bone-Chilling Rendition of “Crucifixion”

Her performances of the Black spiritual in the nineteen-thirties caused American and European audiences to fall silent in awe.
by Alex Ross via The New Yorker on October 19, 2021
MLK in a police station

Martin Luther King Knew That Fighting Racism Meant Fighting Police Brutality

Critics of Black Lives Matter have held up King as a foil to the movement’s criticisms of law enforcement, but those are views that King himself shared.
by Jeanne Theoharis via The Atlantic on September 15, 2021
Pages from the Chicago Defender and Metropolitan News, twentieth century.

The World According to Sylvester Russell

The career and legacy of a Black critic who argued for the elevation of Black performance.
by Dorothy Berry via Lapham’s Quarterly on August 30, 2021
Diagram relating to Black population and diagram of Georgia occupations by race

The Color Line

W.E.B. Du Bois’s exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition offered him a chance to present the dramatic gains made by Black Americans since the end of slavery.
by Annette Gordon-Reed via New York Review of Books on August 5, 2021
Worshipers at a Pentecostal church, Chicago, 1941

A Praise House of Many Mansions

In a book and documentary series, Henry Louis Gates Jr. offers a wide-ranging tour of Black religion in America.
by Erica Armstrong Dunbar via New York Review of Books on April 29, 2021
A 1951 meeting between ADL leadership and Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion.

The Anti-Democratic Origins of the Jewish Establishment

The history of the ADL and AJC reveals that they were created to consolidate the power of wealthy men and stifle the grassroots left.
by Emmaia Gelman via Jewish Currents on March 12, 2021
Yearbook photo of a an African American girl, in front of newspaper headlines and pictures of her as an adult

Meet Claudette Colvin, the 15-Year-Old Who Came Before Rosa Parks

Claudette Colvin is a Civil Rights hero you've probably never heard of. In 1955, she was arrested for refusing to give up her seat, months before Rosa Parks.
via CNN on February 21, 2021
A row of black and white pencils.

Anna Deavere Smith on Forging Black Identity in 1968

In 1968, history found us at a small women’s college, forging our Black identity and empowering our defiance.
by Anna Deavere Smith via The Atlantic on February 9, 2021
A newspaper clipping from the Aug. 7, 1958, issue of the Enlightener, a Black newspaper in Wichita shows the Dockum Drug Store lunch counter sit-in, one of the earliest in the United States.

The Brave, Forgotten Kansas Lunch Counter Sit-in That Helped Change America

The 1958 civil rights protest by Black teens led to the end of segregation at lunch counters all over the state and inspired a wave of sit-ins across the country.
by Kate Torgovnick May via Retropolis on February 6, 2021
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