history

We are fascinated by slavery today. And it’s not a minute too soon. We see what has happened. We know that she who does not know where she has come from cannot possibly guide a path to where she has to go. Maya Angelou was born April 4, 1928, in St. Louis. Her birth name…

It’s amazing no one’s ever been persecuted for treating people like this — taking away their names, taking away everything. People just treat it like it was disco — or bell-bottoms. Just something that happened. Slavery.  Christopher Julius Rock was born Feb. 7, 1965. He grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y. His mother, Rosalie Tingman, was…

The Chickasaw people cannot see any reason or just cause why they should be required to do more for their freed slaves than the white people have done for theirs. It was by the example and teaching of the white man that we purchased at enormous prices their slaves and used their labor and was…

I first learned that there were black people living somewhere in the Western Hemisphere other than the United States when my father told me the first thing he had wanted to be when he grew up. When he was a boy about my age, he said, he wanted to be an Episcopal priest because he…

Visitors to the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900 were introduced to escalators, pictorial panoramas, the Paris Metro and the first films with sound. They also encountered — in a section of the vast world’s fair aptly titled exposé nègre, or Negro exposition — an unusual photo exhibit: hundreds of images of black professionals and…

By Henry Louis Gates Jr. Faces of America: How 12 Extraordinary People Discovered Their Pasts, based on the PBS series Faces of America, is the latest book from Henry Louis Gates Jr., the series’ host and The Root’s editor-in-chief. In it, Gates applies a global perspective to examine the roots and identities of 12 celebrated…

Faces of America: How 12 Extraordinary People Discovered Their Pasts, based on the PBS series Faces of America, is the latest book from Henry Louis Gates Jr., the series’ host and The Root’s editor-in-chief. In it, Gates applies a global perspective to examine the roots and identities of 12 celebrated Americans of diverse backgrounds, from…

Cambridge, Mass. THANKS to an unlikely confluence of history and genetics – the fact that he is African-American and president – Barack Obama has a unique opportunity to reshape the debate over one of the most contentious issues of America’s racial legacy: reparations, the idea that the descendants of American slaves should receive compensation for…

In one of my favorite Malcolm X speeches, the brilliant rhetorician asks, “What’s your name? It isn’t Smith or Jones or Bunche [as in Ralph] or Powell [as in Adam Clayton; Malcolm is playing the dozens here!]. They don’t have those kinds of names where we come from! What’s your name?” It might have shocked…

When the 10.8 million African slaves disembarked from the hell-hole of the slave ships of the Middle Passage, they discovered that they had not sailed alone. In spite of the horrendous conditions onboard ship (15 percent of their countrymen died en route), many aspects of their various African heritages and cultures managed to survive with…