history

Fifty years ago today, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law. The comprehensive, landmark legislation outlawed, among many other things, racial segregation in public accommodations. Jim Crow, in both its more overt Southern and subtler Northern manifestations, was officially proscribed, although racial apartheid would continue in American schools, neighborhoods and the workplace…

While many in the civil rights movement community this summer are celebrating the 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer, another important half-century milestone—and a significantly blacker, more radical one—was recently acknowledged in New York City: the founding of the Organization of Afro-American Unity, Malcolm X’s political organization. If Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of domestic social…

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. A large group of dark-skinned women bend under heavy loads carried on…

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. 86: Which civil rights warrior…

We have traced our roots back to our great-great-great-great-grandfather Lar Henry Green (aka Henry G). According to family legend, he was a slave in France or Portugal, and when he arrived in the U.S., he married a 15-year-old Ethiopian girl. Lar Henry was born in July 1831 and died March 31, 1905, in Ladonia, Texas.…

Editor’s note: On the one-year anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County, Ala. v. Holder, which gutted key provisions of the Voting Rights Act, Sherrilyn A. Ifill will testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee and urge Congress to pass the Voting Rights Amendment Act, S. 1945. Below is a portion of Ifill’s testimony to the committee.…

Those familiar with Freedom Summer know that it was pivotal in putting pressure on the segregated Deep South and setting the tone for legislative change. But exactly how transformative was the summer of 1964? From the number of arrests to the number of African Americans who registered, The Root breaks down the statistics of Freedom…

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. One of the most profound qualities of the classical Greek mind…

In 1961, 19-year-old Howard University student Hank Thomas embarked on a journey that would change interstate travel forever and inspire the birth of other movements. Thomas made a quick decision to join the Congress of Racial Equality’s Freedom Rides to travel from Washington, D.C., to the Deep South with several other young African Americans and…

A backhoe gouged a neat T-shaped scar into a grassy lot in downtown Hampton, Va., revealing … dirt. You could see dark patches in the soil—some circular, others square, most bloblike—but it was still just dirt to the layperson. To archaeologist Dave Hazzard, though, these splotches may be man-made “features,” or possible evidence of one…