history
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Yes, A Different World Is a Moment in Black History
Editor’s note: During Black History Month the focus is usually on historical figures who loomed larger than life, paving the way for the progress we experience today. But black history isn’t just about telling stories of our past. History is being made every day and has been made throughout our lives; it’s not just in…
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Blues Singer Gladys Bentley Broke Ground With Marriage to a Woman in 1931
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…
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How the Concepts of Evil and Darkness Became Linked to African People
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.…
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Excerpt: New Book Documents Courage of Harriet Tubman and Underground Railroad
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…
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Carol Taylor’s 1st Flight Made History for African Americans
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…
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How Did My Free Black Ancestor Live Under the Confederacy?
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…
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A Black Whaling Captain Escaped Prejudice at Sea
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,…
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Keeping Up With the Pharaohs: Mummies in Stylish Footwear
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…
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John Hope Franklin: A Life of Firsts and Flowers
Editor’s note: They Did It First is The Root’s new weekly series on trailblazing people and events in the history of black America. Who was the first (and only) historian to have an orchid named for him? It certainly wasn’t his only “first,” but it was his most unusual. Revered historian John Hope Franklin, the author of…
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How to Hire a Professional Genealogist You Can Trust
For this week’s column, we decided to address an option for going forward when you have taken your family tree research efforts as far as you can take them on your own. How Do You Find a Professional Genealogist You Can Trust? Maybe you’ve hit a wall in tracing an elusive ancestor, or you’ve received…