African American history

“Ever since they left Thies, the women had not stopped singing. As soon as one group allowed the refrain to die, another picked it up, and new verses were born at the hazard of chance or inspiration, one word...

"Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is active as your own, whose range of feelings is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls i...

"Out under the moon and the stars, alone with his son...he walked to the edge of the village, lifted his baby up with his face to the heavens, and said softly, "Fend kiling dorong leh warrata ka iteh tee." (Beh...

The Lincoln Motion Picture Company was the first movie company organized by Black filmmakers, and developed a solid reputation for producing films that, according to one Black observer, “ . . . proved a reve...

The Chicago Defender was the United States' most influential Black weekly newspaper by the advent of World War I, with more than two thirds of its readership base located outside of Chicago. It was founded by R...

The Great Depression of the 1930s, threw millions of Americans out of work. During the depression years, Blacks and whytes routinely "hoboed" (hitchhiked) freight trains, traveling from place to place looking f...

“They came with horses. They came with nightsticks. And I was standing, and people were running... I did not run, so he hit me at the base of my neck, and I became unconsious." ~Amelia Boynton Robinson A...

The Register of the Treasury was an office of the United States Treasury Department. The signature of the Register of the Treasury was found on almost all United States currency until 1923, along with that of t...

On January 1, 1923 a massacre was carried out in Rosewood, a town with about 150 residents. Rosewood was an all-black community, except for one family. The massacre was instigated as a result of rape accusation...

On November 18, 1978, in what became known as the “Jonestown Massacre,” more than 900 members of an American cult called the Peoples Temple died in a mass suicide-murder under the direction of their leader ...