history

The 47th anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination should inspire us all to reimagine this political revolutionary’s final act as a statesman and civil rights leader. In the afterglow of the March on Washington and the Selma-to-Montgomery march, King became a pillar of fire, rejecting the course of political moderation and social…

I’d like to know if I am related to the Younger brothers who ran with Old West outlaw Jesse James and his brothers in the James-Younger gang. According to family lore, we are related to them.  I only know of their family being from Yazoo City, Miss., which is where my mother (Ida Mae Younger)…

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. The pious figure of a black person is often presented as a subsidiary figure within religious works of early-modern Europe.…

Who was the first African-American woman to receive her Ph.D. degree from an American university? (Hint: Three pioneers are considered to share this distinction.) Let’s start with some numbers. In 1903 W.E.B. Du Bois published The Talented Tenth. Here he introduced the term by which he meant the “college-bred Negroes,” the race’s “exceptional men” who…

Dear Professor Gates:  I have been helping my co-worker Quemardo Castilla research his family history, which centers around Madison, Mo. His maternal great-great-great-grandmother’s name was Moriah Castilla, born in 1842. Her exact place of birth is unknown. She had a son named Spencer (spelled Spence in a census record), who was born in 1865. Moriah…

The idea that in order to succeed an artist must first suffer is one with a long history. In that sense, the life and work of Edmonia Lewis, the first black sculptor to gain an international reputation, is instructive, since art historians have judged that “the obstacles [she] overcame are unparalleled in American art.” She…

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. Dominating a tropical landscape filled with an array of sumptuous fruit, a splendidly dressed noblewoman of colonial Spain evokes the…

Who was the first American businessman to furnish hotel guest rooms with amenities and toiletries? As a young man, when the circus came to town, he set up a refreshment stand outside the big top. He had one at the train station, too. The cook’s apprentice-turned-hotel owner was praised upon his death as “the leading…

Yosef ben-Jochannan, one of the last of the Harlem activist-intellectuals of the 20th century—those fiery, independent scholars who taught classical African history and shaped it into a sword against white supremacy—died Thursday after a long illness. He was 96. The man known as Dr. Ben joined his ancestors the morning of the first day of…