history

“I’m curious to know more about my paternal grandfather, Claude Barclay, from Cleveland. ‘Beatrice Penn’ was the name of his wife. He died many years before I was born, and for many reasons my father never talks about him. “During the most recent Thanksgiving holiday, I decided to ask my father and his siblings about…

You can read this quote by Ernest Crichlow, from a 1981 interview with the Stamford Advocate, in Bartlett’s Familiar Black Quotations.Hear more about Crichlow’s work 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…

You can read this quote by Bayard Rustin, from a 1960 radio show with Malcolm X, 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 also…

You can read this quote from Richard Wright, which appeared in his book 12 Million Black Voices (1941), 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 also…

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. Poised in a heroic stance derived from the canon of classical…

Every year during Black History Month, Rosa Parks’ name rolls off the tongues of schoolchildren and educators around the nation as they discuss the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s. Yet the lesser-known Claudette Colvin, whom media outlets have referred to as “The Other Rosa Parks,” still remains absent from any teachings. The…

You can read this quote by Lionel Hampton from his autobiography, Hamp (1989), in Bartlett’s Familiar Black Quotations. Read more quotes from Hampton 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.

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. 69: How often were enslaved Americans…

You can read this quote from Charles Alston, which was said during a 1968 New York Times interview, in Bartlett’s Familiar Black Quotations. Read more about Alston 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…

You can read this quote from Satchel Paige, which appeared in his book Pitchin’ Man: Satchel Paige’s Own Story (1948), 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…