African American History
Martin R. Delany’s Civil War and Reconstruction
Militant? Uncompromising? Pragmatic? Utilitarian? Accommodating? Conservative? To engage Martin Robison Delany (1812–1885) is to wrestle with almost all the complexities and paradoxes of nineteenth-century ...
The Smell of Burning Crosses
Journalist Ira Harkey (1918–2006) risked it all when he advocated for James Meredith’s admission to the University of Mississippi as the first African American student in 1962.
Preceded by a legal ...
Black Intellectual Thought in Modern America
Contributions by Tunde Adeleke, Brian D. Behnken, Minkah Makalani, Benita Roth, Gregory D. Smithers, Simon Wendt, and Danielle L. Wiggins
Black intellectualism has been misunderstood by the American public ...
Slave Sites on Display
At Senegal’s House of Slaves, Barack Obama’s presidential visit renewed debate about authenticity, belonging, and the myth of return—not only for the president, but also for the slave fort itself. ...
Remembering Dixie
Nearly seventy years after the Civil War, Natchez, Mississippi, sold itself to Depression-era tourists as a place “Where the Old South Still Lives. ” Tourists flocked to view the town’s decaying ...
Shocking the Conscience
Within a few years of its first issue in 1951, Jet, a pocket-sized magazine, became the “bible” for news of the civil rights movement. It was said, only half-jokingly, “If it wasn’t in Jet, it ...
Peculiar Rhetoric
The African colonization movement occupies a troubling rhetorical territory in the struggle for racial equality in the United States. For white colonizationists, the movement seemed positioned as a welcome ...
Labor Pains
From the 1930s to the 1960s, the Popular Front produced a significant era in African American literary radicalism. While scholars have long associated the black radicalism of the Popular Front with the ...
Lynching
While victims of antebellum lynchings were typically white men, postbellum lynchings became more frequent and more intense, with the victims more often black. After Reconstruction, lynchings exhibited ...
Three Years in Mississippi
On October 1, 1962, James Meredith was the first African American student to enroll at the University of Mississippi. Preceded by violent rioting resulting in two deaths and a lengthy court battle that ...