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The Black Bucket List: Underground Railroad
One of the most poignant and emotional chapters in the colorful history of blacks in the New World is the saga of enslaved African Americans who chose to escape and make the perilous journey from the South to safer havens up North or in Canada. Usually traveling in the dark of night, often chased by…
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The Black Bucket List: Gullah Country
It looked, at first, like just another fun outdoor festival. An R&B band was rocking onstage; a few visitors were chowing down on burgers and fries. And when the Manhattans, the featured group, started jamming, half the crowd took to their feet. But soon the mood of the program changed and I stepped in closer.…
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The Black Bucket List: Washington, DC
There it was — that familiar face and figure, dressed in a suit with arms folded in front, carved in granite, rising 30 feet above the National Mall. Even on a wet and humid September Monday, a crowd of sightseers trailed toward the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial. Unveiled only a few weeks…
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The Black Side of Boston
The stately Federal-style buildings of Beacon Hill, the Bunker Hill Monument or the market at Faneuil Hall are usually the sights that dazzle visitors to Boston. But during my own recent trip to New England, it was a bronze relief of black soldiers that captured my attention. The Robert Gould Shaw 54th Regiment Memorial, perched…
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Birmingham's Brilliant Black History
No American city evokes the brutal drama, violent confrontations or ultimate triumphs of the civil rights movement more than Birmingham, Ala. It was in a small park in this slow-paced Southern city, in the early 1960s, that waves of black schoolchildren gathered by the hundreds to protest the injustices of segregation, only to be met…
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Oklahoma! Where the Black Towns Once Thrived
Greenwood Avenue, a wide residential street in Tulsa, Okla., has a bucolic calm to it these days. But stroll it slowly, past the handsome, ranch-style homes, toward downtown, and black history hangs heavy over the place. And no wonder. It’s along this street in late May 1921 that a ragtag mob, bearing shotguns, pistols and…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
