history

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…

Growing up, I saw a picture of my great-great-grandparents, and it has fascinated me. My great-great-grandfather John Dow was a white man born in Arkansas. He left Arkansas around age 11 in search of his father, Samuel Ward, in Mississippi. He eventually married Eddie Smith, a black woman, and had 10 children. I can’t find…

Exactly one week ago today, Wellesley College announced the appointment of its 14th president, Paula A. Johnson. There is obviously no list of “14ths,” but Johnson, a physician whose work has stood at the intersection of health care and women’s rights throughout her distinguished career, made history as the college’s first African-American president. As reported…

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,…

I was born in 1975, the same year that Portugal withdrew from its five African colonies—Angola, Mozambique, São Tomé and Príncipe, Cape Verde Islands and Guinea-Bissau—becoming the last of the European powers to finally abandon colonialism.  Throughout my life, I have been told that we, the Portuguese, were the explorers who discovered the world. We were…

Dear Professor Gates: I have done an autosomal DNA test for most of my relatives and ancestors, including my father. He is of Lebanese origin (born in 1959 in a village near Kartaba, also spelled Qartaba), but I discovered that his ancestry contains 4 percent Central-East African. Both my brothers inherited 2 percent African DNA. However,…

Fifty years ago today, on Feb. 11, 1966, District 6—an iconic, densely populated, predominantly Coloured, working-class neighborhood on the outskirts of Cape Town, South Africa—was reclassified as a “whites-only area,” a result of the infamous Group Areas Act introduced by the odious apartheid government. With that piece of pernicious legislation began the relocation of some…

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…

Mention the history of African Americans in Paris and images immediately flood of fabled artists, authors, activists and entertainers who found succor and success in the famed City of Light. There is likely no such recollection for the black American presence in London, Europe’s other famed capital city. But black Americans have made “a big…

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…