Booker T. Washington

How my great-grandfather invented himself at the end of Reconstruction.

A look at how and why African Americans first started to abandon the GOP for the Democratic Party.

The enduring necessity (and importance) of a nearly 200-year-old technology.

A review of three new studies about how race and class intersect.

Tracing the histories and legacies of technology and empire through a wooden bicycle at Thinktank Birmingham Science Museum.

How Black women used exercise to achieve civic goals in the late nineteenth century.

C.R. Patterson & Sons of Greenfield became the first Black-owned automobile manufacturer in 1915. More than a century later, it remains the only known one.

With bar graphs and pie charts, the sociologist and his Atlanta students demonstrated Black excellence in the face of widespread discrimination.

Contrary to popular belief, the South has always been the key to defining the promise and limits of American democracy.

A new book on Claude McKay is part of an effort to place the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance within the Black radical tradition.

Freedom and prosperity are the most effective cure for the scars of slavery and racism.

Soul City was a boondoggle—not a story of lost or forgotten roads tragically not taken.

While W. E. B. Du Bois praised an expanding penitentiary system, T. Thomas Fortune called for investment in education and a multiracial, working-class movement.

The Coloured Hockey League doesn’t get a prominent place in most tellings of hockey’s story, but its legacy is undeniable.

As Frederick Douglass’s master put it, a slave who learned to read and write against the will of his master was tantamount to “running away with himself.”

The temperance movement wasn’t an example of American exceptionalism; it was a globe-spanning network of activists and politicians against economic exploitation.

Repression, mediation, and division of Black resistance from 1906 to the 2020 George Floyd Uprising.

The career and legacy of a Black critic who argued for the elevation of Black performance.

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.

Historical traces of racism and exclusion remain on the island. It’s just that new residents can’t—or won’t—read them.