history
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Is This the End of the 2nd Reconstruction?
This has been a bruising time for the African-American community—as bruising as any in recent memory. The tragic deaths of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, the Rev. Clementa Pinckney and the other eight victims in Charleston, S.C.—as well as others too numerous to name, but whose lives and…
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Ada ‘Bricktop’ Smith: Once the Grande Dame of Paris’ Nightclub Scene
In the 1920s and 1930s, Ada “Bricktop” Smith reigned as the grande dame of the Paris nightclub scene. T.S. Eliot wrote a poem for her, and she was a muse to the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, who boasted, “My greatest claim to fame is that I discovered Bricktop before [songwriter] Cole Porter.” It was under…
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How Can I Research My Roots Without Spending Money?
I’m 28 years old and on a mission to find out more about my roots, particularly on my mother’s side of the family. Unfortunately, everyone who could help me find answers is now deceased. Where can I look for answers, given that I really have no budget for this search? My mother’s family was from…
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Did My Ancestor Own the Former Slave Whose Info I Found Online?
My family, descended from Thomas Chaffe (1635), is well-documented in The Chaffee Genealogy by William Chaffee (1909) and I’ve traced a direct line back to Thomas in 12 generations. Also well-documented is the fact that the woman who owned the slave Dred Scott, Irene Sanford Emerson, married one of my ancestors. But this isn’t about…
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Unbroken Spirits: Black Family Legends About Rebellious Forebears
Many of us have them: an old family story about an ancestor who was defiant in the face of oppression or who simply defied society at every turn. Such stories help define us and remind us that we come from people whose spines remained unbowed, no matter what America heaped upon them. Below are three…
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From Where in Africa Were the Slaves Who Landed in Va.?
From which African countries did the slaves brought to Virginia come? I know from the results of a saliva test I had 20 years ago that my maternal line was traced to western Nigeria—the Hausa tribe. However, I also want to know in which African country my Virginian paternal line originated. —Carolyn Nicholas As previously…
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Before Emmett Till’s Death, Willie James Howard, 15, Was Murdered in Fla.
Eleven years before Emmett Till’s bloated and brutalized corpse was displayed on the pages of Jet magazine as proof of the South’s atrocities against African Americans, there was Willie James Howard. The difference was that in 1944, there was no Jet magazine to tell Willie’s story, of how the 15-year-old’s crush on a white girl…
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Was My Ancestor Transracially Adopted Over a Century Ago?
My great-grandfather William Elijah Gantt was allegedly born in Charles County, Md., Feb. 4, 1886. He was a light-skinned black man who might have been called “mulatto” in his day. He only exists from the 1910 census to his death, married to my great-grandmother Ruth Folsom Jackson. The family story is that he was never…
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How Did My Ancestor Become a Free Woman of Color and Single Mom in 1840?
I found my maternal great-great-great-grandmother, Eliza Simpson, on an 1840 Free Persons Census list, living in Washington, D.C., as head of household with, presumably, her son, Marshall (who was born in 1835), and her mother. She was a free single, unmarried mother, all of which surprised me. I found them again in the 1850 census,…
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Julian Bond’s ‘Comic’ Stance on the Vietnam War
Say the name aloud of our new ancestor, Julian Bond, and generations of black Americans will think of a clear, proud voice. For some, they hear the sophisticated trumpet for justice as a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the rabble-rousing, hell-raising civil rights organization that pushed Martin Luther King Jr. into militancy and,…