History Archives

In my more militant youth, I used to argue that May 19 should have been a national holiday. And if it couldn’t be one, then at the least I could sacrifice a day of school or work to commemorate Malcolm X’s birthday. In retrospect, that was stupid (maybe immature is the better word) because if Read More

Adam Serwer is a little uncomfortable with President Obama’s ‘predator drones” joke at this weekend’s White House Correspondents Dinner: So you have to wonder why in the world the president’s speech writers would think it was a good idea to throw a joke about predator drones into the president’s speech during the White House Correspondent’s Read More

Today, much has been said about Dr. Dorothy Height’s life and legacy. I don’t have much to add, aside from saying that she was highly revered by many of my classmates at Howard University. The WaPo has a great slideshow up now. I know some people are partial to her hats and sequins, but I’m Read More

Ta-Nehisi says that Malcolm is his heart and King is his brain. I’d never really had the Malcolm obsession that seemed to enthrall so many of the folks I grew up with, particularly around the time that Spike Lee’s biopic dropped. (In the perhaps unavoidable commodification of Malcolm’s image, every other person in Philly seemed Read More

Martin Luther King was never the saintly, beloved man in life that he has become in death. Ari Kelman over at Edge of the West gave us permission to re-run this fantastic post on Martin Luther King, Jr., and the sterilization of his image. The Martin Luther King of American memory serves this nation as Read More

Not to spend too much time on “Negrogate,” but Slate’s Brian Palmer has a good history of the word “Negro” that’s definitely worth reading: Colored was the preferred term for black Americans until WEB DuBois, following the lead of Booker T. Washington, advocated for a switch to Negro in the 1920s. (DuBois also used black in his writings, but Read More

Shamefully enough, I had no clue who Percy Sutton was or why he was important until I stumbled across his obituary on page 3A of my local newspaper. And though I’m usually wary of venturing into hyperbole, the Rev. Al Sharpton is not too far off in summing up the incredibly interesting and distinctive life Read More

The New York Times conducted a study on Michelle Obama’s ancestry. In 1850, the elderly master of a South Carolina estate took pen in hand and painstakingly divided up his possessions. Among the spinning wheels, scythes, tablecloths and cattle that he bequeathed to his far-flung heirs was a 6-year-old slave girl valued soon afterward at Read More

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