history

Editor’s note: For those who are wondering about the retro title of this black-history series, please take a moment to learn about historian Joel A. Rogers, author of the 1934 book 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro With Complete Proof, to whom these “amazing facts” are an homage. Amazing Fact About the Negro No. 88: Which event in black…

There is a legend in my family that we are related to Elston Howard, the first African American to play for the New York Yankees. Proving this is difficult, and needless to say I have hit a huge wall. Elston’s bio says he was born in 1929 in St. Louis and died in 1980 in…

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. Through the simple pairing of a half-length figure with a large vase of flowers, a fertile discourse is opened on the…

What does white America owe black America? To even broach that question 50 years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 seems straight-out wacky. Did not the election of a black president redeem the nation? At a minimum, it’s rude—refusing to avert the eyes from that elephant in the room: “America begins in black plunder…

Editor’s note: For those who are wondering about the retro title of this black-history series, please take a moment to learn about historian Joel A. Rogers, author of the 1934 book 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro With Complete Proof, to whom these “amazing facts” are an homage. Amazing Fact About the Negro No. 87: What happened to Argentina’s…

Editor’s note: This article was originally published by ProPublica. In 1947, my father, along with his mother and older brother, boarded a northbound train in Greenwood, Miss. They carried with them nothing but a suitcase stuffed with clothes, a bag of cold chicken, and my grandmother’s determination that her children—my father was just 2 years…

I believe that my great-grandparents were brought to America from Africa on the last known slave ship, the Clotilde. I would like your help confirming that they came here on that ship, and anything else you can find out about their origins. The schooner Clotilde (or Clotilda) was the last known U.S. slave ship to…

I vividly remember the affirmative action debates that raged on my campus when I was a college student in the early ’90s. Many of our debates centered on Stephen L. Carter’s Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby. To me, Carter was a person who had benefited from his inclusion in formerly all-white spaces who had…

This image is part of a weekly series that The Root is presenting in conjunction with the Image of the Black in Western Art Archive at Harvard University’s W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute, part of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. Represented on this wooden panel is a rare sequence of narrative…

For those who are wondering about the retro title of this black-history series, please take a moment to learn about historian Joel A. Rogers, author of the 1934 book 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro With Complete Proof, to whom these “amazing facts” are an homage. Amazing Fact About the Negro No. 38: Did black…