One March day in 1984, Onnie Lee Logan received a letter from the Mobile, Ala., County Board of Health, telling her that her services were no longer required and that her license to practice as a midwife was revoked with immediate effect. The letter thanked her for her 38 years of faithful service to the…

“Get the girl to check the numbers.” These words came from astronaut John Glenn in February 1962 as he prepared to become the first American to orbit the Earth. The trajectory of his orbit had been calculated by NASA’s new state-of-the-art computers, but Glenn did not trust the machines. Mercury 7 astronauts had always relied…

Philadelphians had little to cheer about in the winter of 1932. Over 250,000 people—a quarter of the workforce—were unemployed, many more were working part time, and thousands had lost their savings with the collapse of several banks. For black Philadelphians, the Great Depression was even worse. Only 13 percent enjoyed full-time employment, 45 percent were…

On May 24, 1796, a runaway-slave advertisement was posted in the Pennsylvania Gazette by the steward at George Washington’s house in Philadelphia. It read: Absconded from the household of the President of the United States, ONEY JUDGE, a light mulatto girl, much freckled, with very black eyes and bushy hair. She is of middle stature, slender,…

On a summer’s day in 1798, María Rafaela Whitten stood in the doorway of a house in St. Augustine, Fla., owned by Don José Sánchez, one of the wealthiest Spanish planters in the community. Whitten, a free black woman in her early 40s, was waiting there for a young female slave apprenticed to her. Don…

The recent biopic The Race reminds us of Jesse Owens’ amazing feat in winning a then-record four track gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. The movie accurately frames Owens’ (Stephan James) victories as a rebuke to the Nazi propaganda machine, which was trying to use the games to promote the myth of white supremacy. Claims of…

In the early hours of Sunday, Sept. 9, 1739, 20 enslaved black men gathered near a bridge over the Stono River, southwest of Charles Town (now Charleston), S.C., where they were part of a work gang building a public road. Most of them, including their leader, Jemmy, appear to have been among the 8,000 Kikongo…

In September 1864, Spotswood Rice, a 44-year-old soldier in the 67th Regiment of the United States Colored Infantry, wrote two letters from his hospital bed at a U.S. Army barracks near St. Louis. Seventy-three years later, in the same city, his daughter, Mary A. Bell, by then an 85-year-old widow, sat down in her four-room,…

In April 1949, President Harry S. Truman offered Ralph Bunche a coveted position as the assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern, South Asian and African affairs. The position would make Bunche, then the United Nations’ chief mediator between Israel and the Arab states, the highest-ranking African American in the federal government and would position…

In 1613, seven years before the Pilgrims landed in Plymouth, and six years before a Dutch vessel sold 20 Africans to the Virginia colonists at Jamestown, a black man named Jan Rodrigues was the first non-Native American to settle and trade on what is now Manhattan Island. Rodrigues, described in Dutch records as “Spanish” and…