African American History
The Real Ambassadors
Keith Hatschek tells the story of three determined artists: Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, and Iola Brubeck and the stand they took against segregation by writing and performing a jazz musical titled ...
The Recovered Life of Isaac Anderson
Owned by his father, Isaac Harold Anderson (1835–1906) was born a slave but went on to become a wealthy businessman, grocer, politician, publisher, and religious leader in the African American community ...
Maria W. Stewart and the Roots of Black Political Thought
Maria W. Stewart and the Roots of Black Political Thought tells a crucial, almost-forgotten story of African Americans of early nineteenth-century America. In 1833, Maria W. Stewart (1803–1879) told ...
The Artistic Activism of Elombe Brath
In 1963, at the height of the southern civil rights movement, Cecil Brathwaite (1936–2014), under the pseudonym Cecil Elombe Brath, published a satire of Black leaders entitled Color Us Cullud! The ...
Race and Racism in Nineteenth-Century Art
Painters Robert Duncanson (ca. 1821–1872) and Edward Bannister (1828–1901) and sculptor Mary Edmonia Lewis (ca. 1844–1907) each became accomplished African American artists. But as emerging art ...
Rough Tactics
In Rough Tactics: Black Performance in Political Spectacles, 1877–1932, author Mark A. Johnson examines three notable cases of Black participation in the spectacles of politics: the 1885–1898 local-option ...
Black Boys Burning
On the morning of March 5, 1959, Luvenia Long was listening to gospel music when a news bulletin interrupted her radio program. Fire had engulfed the Arkansas Negro Boys Industrial School in Wrightsville, ...
Invisible Ball of Dreams
Winner of the 2018 John Coates Next Generation Award from the Negro Leagues Research Committee of the Society for American Baseball Research
Although many Americans think of Jackie Robinson when considering ...
I AM A MAN
In the American South, the civil rights movement in the 1960s and the struggle to abolish racial segregation erupted in dramatic scenes at lunch counters, in schools, and in churches. The admission of ...
Racial Terrorism
In December 2018, the United States Senate unanimously passed the nation’s first antilynching act, the Justice for Victims of Lynching Act. For the first time in US history, legislators, representing ...