history

“I have had both of my parents’ ancestry tested by 23andMe, and I have been tested as well. I am ostensibly European, but both parents received West African-ancestry DNA results. I am 1.3 percent West African, which Doug McDonald of the University of Illinois verified as being of Yoruba origins. “My father has 1.4 percent…

You can read this quote from the essay “The Crisis” (1920), and other quotes from W.E.B. Du Bois, 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…

You can read this Madam C.J. Walker quote, from her speech to the National Negro Business League (1912), in Bartlett’s Familiar Black Quotations. Read more about Walker 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 the novel Quicksand, and others from Nella Larsen, 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 the editor-in-chief of The Root. Follow…

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. From a position firmly fixed between the mundane and the sacred,…

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. 66:…

You can read this quote from Zora Neale Hurston’s autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), and other quotes from Hurston, 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.…

You can read this quote from the book Having Our Say, and other quotes from Bessie Delany, 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 the…

You can read this Nat Turner quote, from the book The Confessions of Nat Turner (1831), 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 the editor-in-chief of The…

You can read this quote by Kara Walker, from a 1996 interview, in Bartlett’s Familiar Black Quotations. Read how the quote is referenced 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…