history

I wonder if my ancestors went the wrong way in their search for land sometime between the mid-1840s and early 1850s. They were black, and they went from Mexico to Natchez, Miss., during slavery. Why? My great-great-great-grandfather Thomas Hinyard/Henyard was born about 1833. His sister Milly (Hinyard) McFarland was born in 1837, and his brother…

This year is the 100th anniversary of what is now called the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, the organization founded by Carter G. Woodson (1875-1950). Woodson is the founder of Negro History Week, which he created in 1926. It’s officially been known as Black History Month since 1976. Woodson had many…

Editor’s note: For Black History Month, The Root is spotlighting less famous figures from the African American National Biography, whose stories cast a light on hidden or barely remembered episodes from the African-American past. Gladys Bentley, a blues singer and lesbian icon, claimed to have been born in the Caribbean. Appearing on the hit 1950s game show You Bet…

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. When one is investigating the role of people of African descent in Western art, the results often take surprising turns.…

Editor’s note: Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and scholar Eric Foner has just published Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad. With new research and documentation, Foner explores the courageous lives of those who helped slaves escape to freedom on the Eastern corridor of the U.S. and describes how their actions affected the Civil…

Who was the first African-American flight attendant for a U.S. airline? The skies weren’t always so friendly to black people. In the mid-1950s, the handful of black employees working for the major U.S. carriers were in service positions, and all the pilots (male only) and flight attendants (stewardesses or hostesses, in the vernacular of the…

My third-great-grandfather Jacob Sampson (1786-1870) of Goochland County, Va., owned a 500-acre plantation in Goochland before, during and after the Civil War. I know he was a slave until 1821, and the land is listed on an 1863 Confederate map of the county. It seems odd that there is so little information about a former…

Editor’s note: For Black History Month, The Root is spotlighting less famous figures from the African American National Biography, whose stories cast a light on hidden or barely remembered episodes from the African-American past. William T. Shorey, a whaling captain known as the Black Ahab, after Moby Dick’s protagonist, was born in Barbados in 1859,…

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. Four naked warriors, all still wearing a quiver of arrows, but lacking their bows, kneel within the decorative borders of…