Assembly member Reginald Jones-Sawyer, a member of the California reparations task force, in Los Angeles, California, US, on Friday, May 5, 2023. California has been the most proactive state when it comes to organizing a reasonable plan to give Black people reparations for the harm that slavery has caused them for hundreds of years. The California Reparations Task Force has […]
(New York, NY) Senator James Sanders Jr., Chair of the Senate Banks Committee, Assemblymember Michaelle Solages, Chair of The New York State Black, Puerto Rican, Hispanic and Asian Legislative Caucus, and nearly 70 elected officials from around the state signed a letter to Governor Kathy Hochul urging her to sign the reparations commission bill into law. […]
By Amira Castilla, The Root Just when the United States started to close the gap between life expectancy rates amongst races, Covid-19 wrecked the chance. In an interview with CBS News in June 2022, Dr. Greg Roth at the University of Washington School of Medicine said that the gap between Black and white life expectancy […]
By Calvin Schermerhorn, The Conversation It’s an old saying that Britain and America are two countries separated by a common language. But they are united by racial wealth gaps that formed at a similar time for related reasons. Black Britons of the “Windrush generation,” arriving in Britain from the Caribbean between 1948 and 1973, and […]
Mary McLeod Bethune became the first Black person elevated by a state for recognition in the Capitol’s Statuary Hall.
WASHINGTON DC, USA – AUGUST 5, 2016: Statue of Mary Jane McLeod Bethune – an American educator and civil rights activist known for starting a private school for African-American students in Florida. (Shutterstock) By The Associated Press, NBC News WASHINGTON — Civil rights leader and trailblazing educator Mary McLeod Bethune on Wednesday became the first […]
“Choosing your surname gives you that power to say, ‘This is what I’m gonna be called from now on,’” explained genealogist Kenyatta Berry.
By Julia Craven Oluale Kossula: That’s the name author Zora Neale Hurston used when she greeted Cudjo Lewis, the last known survivor of the transatlantic slave trade and the subject of her nonfiction book “Barracoon.” He was delighted at being addressed by the name his mother gave him, according to Hurston’s account of the hours […]
By National Urban League “Cliff was an American original—a civil rights trailblazer whose eyes were never shut to injustice but whose heart was always open. He was like a father to me and an inspiration to Barack. We admired the way he fought and learned from the way he led.” – Michelle Obama The name of […]
The 15th Amendment was supposed to guarantee Black men the right to vote, but exercising that right became another challenge.
Washington, D.C. | U.S.A. – Aug 28, 2021: March On for Voting Rights “Protect Voting Rights” (Shutterstock) By Sarah Pruitt, History In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, the United States found itself in uncharted territory. With the Confederacy’s defeat, some 4 million enslaved Black men, women and children had been granted their freedom, […]
Representative Bennie G. Thompson, chairman of the committee investigating the attack on the Capitol, has spent his career fighting to protect the right to vote.
By Richard Fausset and Luke Broadwater, NY Times BOLTON, Miss.— It was here, in this majority-Black town of 441 people, that Representative Bennie G. Thompson attended a segregated junior high school. It was where his father spent a lifetime working as a mechanic and paying taxes, but never enjoying the right to vote. And it […]
By Karen Greene Braithwaite, as told to Lynnette Nicholas, Reader’s Digest When I was growing up in the late 1970s, I didn’t learn the full truth about America’s history from my teachers. Back then, you only got bits and pieces of America’s past. It wasn’t until college that I became more informed. When the Declaration […]