history

Dear Professor Gates: For example, George Marshall Christian’s brother, Charles Monroe Christian, appears to have also used his first and middle name interchangeably. His full name is recorded on his World War I draft registration card, which we pulled up on Ancestry.com (subscription required), but in the 1920 census (also available on Ancestry.com), his name…

In 1865, enslaved Africans on Galveston Island, Texas, had been declared free two years earlier but didn’t know it. With the United States still divided over the institution of slavery and recovering after the Civil War, members of the Confederacy weren’t eager to spread the word. Only after Union soldiers, led by Major Gen. Gordon…

Hours after President Barack Obama was sworn in as the nation’s first black president, a white man was dousing gasoline on a house of worship in Massachusetts because, he said, “it was a n—ger church.” Years before, the FBI managed to infiltrate a White Aryan Resistance group and discovered its attempt to kick off a race…

The brutal act of racial terror that took the lives of nine black parishioners at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., purposely targeted the most important institution that has ever existed in the black community: the black church. So it should come as no surprise that in the age of Ferguson, Mo., Baltimore…

Recently I came across an amended birth certificate, which I am sending to you, that my great-grandfather Governor Burnett Crossing filed in Nashville, Tenn., in 1944. It says that my great-grandfather was born in 1879 in Martin, Dyer County, Tenn. The certificate states that his father, Zonnie Crossing, was from Tennessee and his mother, Hettie…

The Image of the Black Archive & Library resides at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. The founding director of the Hutchins Center is Henry Louis Gates Jr., who is also co-founder of The Root. The archive and Harvard University Press collaborated to create The Image of the Black in Western…

The earliest record I have for my great-grandparents is a marriage license dated 1867. The marriage takes place in Shelby County, Ala. My great-grandmother Louvenia Pierce was born in Georgia. My great-grandfather Archie Brown was born in North Carolina. In 1900 they became Morrisons. I have used Ancestry.com, FamilySearch, MyHeritage and Fold3. Is there some local Alabama…

This image is part of a weekly series that The Root is presenting in conjunction with the Image of the Black Archive & Library at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. During the long and odious history of slavery, moral objection to its depredations has resulted in many counterstrategies to aid…

I have a question about my grandmother Ola Mae Waters, who was born in September 1937 and passed in May 1977 in a Georgia nursing home or hospital. Her children went into foster care before her sister received custody of them. My mom and her siblings attended her funeral. However, the state has no death certificate. I…

Memorial Day is a sacred occasion when we pay tribute to all the military men and women who have died in service to the United States. It is also an observance that owes its creation to blacks. This tradition began when newly freed slaves decorated the grave sites of Civil War soldiers as a way…