African American History
Delta Epiphany
In April 1967, a year before his run for president, Senator Robert F. Kennedy knelt in a crumbling shack in Mississippi trying to coax a response from a listless child. The toddler sat picking at dried ...
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
Winner of the 2020 Marie Hochmuth Nichols Award from the Public Address Division of the National Communication Association
The African colonization movement occupies a troubling rhetorical territory in ...
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
Winner of the 2020 Rhetoric Society of America Book Award
While victims of antebellum lynchings were typically white men, postbellum lynchings became more frequent and more intense, with the victims more ...