history

(The Root) — Amazing Fact About the Negro No. 4: Who was the first black president in North America? That would be Barack Obama, right? While most of us have assumed this, and while this has been widely reported in the media, it turns out that this is not true. As a matter of fact,…

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. (The Root) — Amazing Fact About…

(The Root) — Amazing Fact About the Negro No. 2: Who was the first African to arrive in America? Like many of you, I was always told that the first Africans to arrive in what is now the United States were the “20 and odd” Africans who arrived as slaves in Jamestown, Va., from what…

(The Root) — In 1934, Joel Augustus Rogers, a highly regarded journalist in the black press, published a remarkable little book of 51 pages titled 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro With Complete Proof: A Short Cut to the World History of the Negro. I have been intrigued by this book, and by its author,…

The Root’s editor-in-chief, Henry Louis Gates Jr., wrote this about Don Cornelius ––who died Wednesday morning at the age of 75 –in his book Life Upon These Shores: Don Cornelius badly wanted his own radio show, and he took dramatic steps to realize his dream. In 1966, the Chicago native left his steady job at…

Red Tails, the new George Lucas film depicting the valiant Tuskegee Airmen, reminds us of the often overlooked role of African Americans in World War II and their noble achievements. While much has been written about the airmen, very few of us understand how important three women were to their existence. And this is one…

Sandy Harris chose to fight for the freedom of other blacks. And this sense of service became a leitmotif in Lawrence-Lightfoot’s family. People who could have passed didn’t pass. People who could have stayed in the North instead headed South to work in impoverished communities. It’s a structuring principle of Lawrence-Lightfoot’s ancestry. Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot is…

How do race and racism play themselves out in the Caribbean? To see for myself, I boarded a fight to the Dominican Republic, on the island of Hispaniola — which it shares, somewhat uneasily, with Haiti. The people here, on opposite sides of this island, have faced each other across this body of land for…

On the Ash side, we had been able to trace his oldest ancestor to a birth before the Revolutionary War, an extraordinary accomplishment for a black person who was not freed before the Civil War. On the Copeland side, we went back well into the early 19th century. Benjamin Solomon Carson was born on Sept.…

Dear Readers of The Root, Let me take this opportunity to tell you how excited I am about our home page redesign, which launched on July 21. Over the past three years, we have worked hard to make The Root the premier news and information site with an African-American perspective. The amount of quality content…