history

You can read this quote by Hoyt W. Fuller, from his essay “Towards a Black Aesthetic” (1968), in Bartlett’s Familiar Black Quotations. Read the quote in its full context here. Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and founding director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He is…

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. 71: What percentage of white…

You can read this quote from Fred Shuttlesworth, as quoted in Martin Luther King Jr.’s Why We Can’t Wait (1964), in Bartlett’s Familiar Black Quotations. Read more about Shuttlesworth here. Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and founding director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He is also the…

“ … literature is an affirmative act, but, being specifically concerned with moral values and reality, it has to deal with the possibility of defeat. Underlying it most profoundly is the sense that man dies but his values continue. The mediating role of literature is to leave the successors with the sense of what is…

You can read this lyric from Lord Kitchener’s 1953 song “Black or White” in Bartlett’s Familiar Black Quotations. Listen to the song here. Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and founding director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He is also the editor-in-chief of The Root. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

“You may remember, as I well do … there were, on board, ten or a dozen slaves, shackled together with irons. That sight was a continual torment to me; and I see something like it every time I touch the Ohio … It is hardly fair for you to assume, that I have no interest…

You can read this quote by Dorothy Dandridge, from a 1954 interview with the New York Post, in Bartlett’s Familiar Black Quotations. Read more about Dandridge here. Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and founding director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He is also the editor-in-chief…

My last name is Stradwick. However, my late grandfather, Thomas Stradwick, said that was not our family’s original surname. He said his father, James, changed his last name to Stradwick, for reasons unknown, before he married my great-grandmother Lilly Ferguson of South Carolina. But what he changed his last name from is the mystery. My…

This week marks the 49th anniversary of one of the most important events in American history. It began on March 7, 1965, when Alabama state troopers routed peaceful demonstrators on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, which was dedicated on Monday as a national landmark. The violence that engulfed the nonviolent, overwhelmingly black cadre of…

You can read this quote by Jackie Robinson, from an interview with Time magazine, in Bartlett’s Familiar Black Quotations. Read more about Robinson here. Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and founding director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He is also the editor-in-chief of The Root. Follow him…