Black history newspaper articles, racism in American history. Black history news articles collected, to read online free.
10 Remarkable Runaway Ads
by Don N. Hagist, Journal of the American Revolution 2014
See the Menu at the top of every page for Directories of Free Online Fiction and NonFiction Books, Magazines, and more, on 400 pages like this at Century Past
100 Must-Read Classics by People of Color
Teresa Preston, Book Riot, 2017
See our books on Antiques PDF
Texas officials: Schools should teach that slavery was ‘side issue’ to Civil War
Five million public school students in Texas will begin using new social studies textbooks this fall based on state academic standards that barely address racial segregation. The state’s guidelines for teaching American history also do not mention the Ku Klux Klan or Jim Crow laws. And when it comes to the Civil War, children are supposed to learn that the conflict was caused by “sectionalism, states’ rights and slavery” — written deliberately in that order to telegraph slavery’s secondary role in driving the conflict, according to some members of the state board of education.
Emma Brown, Washington Post 2015
Emmett Till’s mother opened his casket and sparked the civil rights movement
DeNeen L. Brown, Washington Post 2018
See our free pdf books on African American history
The quest for equality: exhibition explores black citizenship in the age of Jim Crow
At the New-York Historical Society, the difficulties faced by black Americans even after ‘freedom’ was gained are studied in a powerful new exhibition
Julianne McShane, Guardian 2018
95 Bodies Suspected to Be Jim Crow-Era Forced Laborers Found in Texas
All but one of the remains tested so far have been African-American males
Sarah Pruitt, History 2018
The Man Who Changed His Skin
Thirty years ago John Howard Griffin, a white Texan, became an itinerant Southern black for four weeks. His account of the experience galvanized the nation.
Ernest Sharpe Jr., American Heritage 1989
The Massacre of Black Sharecroppers That Led the Supreme Court to Curb the Racial Disparities of the Justice System
White Arkansans, fearful of what would happen if African-Americans organized, took violent action, but it was the victims who ended up standing trial
Francine Uenuma, Smithsonian 2018
See our selection of free history magazines
The North’s Jim Crow
“Quality of life” laws serve as a potent instrument of racial segregation. They provide commercial establishments, law enforcement officers and everyday citizens with tools enabling them to police racial boundaries while at the same time claiming to simply be upholding the law. In contrast to the Jim Crow laws of America’s dark past, these laws supposedly apply to everyone. But in practice, they clearly don’t.
Andrew W. Kahrl, NY Times 2018
The preacher who used Christianity to revive the Ku Klux Klan
DeNeen L. Brown, Washington Post 2018
The Racial Segregation of American Cities Was Anything But Accidental
A housing policy expert explains how federal government policies created the suburbs and the inner city
Katie Nodjimbadem, Smithsonian 2017
See our post about 19th Century American Indian Authors
A Fate Worse Than Slavery, Unearthed in Sugar Land
Bodies of sugar cane workers recently discovered in Texas reveal gruesome details about the convict leasing system.
Brent Staples, New York Times 2018
Slavery in the South Today
A revelation of appalling conditions in Florida and other states, which make possible the actual enslavement of whites and blacks under trust domination.
Richard Barry, Cosmopolitan 1907
See our collected articles about U.S. History in the 19th Century
See our Biography Dictionaries
Take The Near Impossible Literacy Test Louisiana Used to Suppress the Black Vote (1964)
Open Culture 2014
See our Newsweek Archives 1960s
The Racial Wealth Gap and the Problem of Historical Narration
Destin Jenkins, Process History Blog 2017
The South Doesn’t Own Slavery
American slavery had no bounds. It penetrated every corner of this country, materially, economically and ideologically, and the unjust campaign to preserve it is embedded in our built environments, North and South, East and West. Detroit is a surprising case in point.
Tiya Miles, NY Times 2017
See our post about Historical Novels set in the Southern U.S.
A ‘Forgotten History’ Of How The U.S. Government Segregated America
In 1933, faced with a housing shortage, the federal government began a program explicitly designed to increase — and segregate — America’s housing stock. Author Richard Rothstein says the housing programs begun under the New Deal were tantamount to a “state-sponsored system of segregation.”
Terry Gross, NPR 2017
When Portland banned blacks: Oregon’s shameful history as an ‘all-white’ state
In 1844, all black people were ordered to get out of Oregon Country, the expansive territory under American rule that stretched from the Pacific coast to the Rocky Mountains. Those who refused to leave could be severely whipped, the provisional government law declared, by “not less than twenty or more than thirty-nine stripes” to be repeated every six months until they left.
DeNeen L. Brown, Washington Post 2017
See our collected articles on the history of popular culture
Racial divides have been holding American workers back for more than a century
Racial animus trumps economic anxiety, and has for decades.
Calvin Schermerhorn, Washington Post 2017
Frederick Douglass needed to see Lincoln. Would the president meet with a former slave?
Douglass, the famous orator and abolitionist who had been recruiting “colored troops” for the Union Army, was incensed that black soldiers captured by Confederate troops had been mutilated, tortured and assassinated in cold blood. Some had been sold into slavery. Douglass wanted an immediate meeting with President Abraham Lincoln. He was not sure he would get in.
DeNeen L. Brown, Washington Post 2018
A digital archive of slave voyages details the largest forced migration in history
Philip Misevich, and others, The Conversation, 2017
Racism Kept Connecticut’s Beaches White Up Through the 1970s
By bussing black kids from Hartford to the shore, Ned Coll took a stand against the bigotry of “armchair liberals”
Amy Crawford, Smithsonian 2018
Separating Migrant Families Is Barbaric. It’s Also What the U.S. Has Been Doing to People of Color for Hundreds of Years.
Shaun King, Intercept 2018
Slavery Is Detroit’s Big, Bad Secret. Why Don’t We Know Anything About It?
Slavery in Detroit has remained an enormous secret. It is an essential chapter in Detroit’s 311-year story, but it has been pushed back into archives and covered up by decades of neglect and denial. Few people, even well-informed college graduates, know that slavery played a key role in the growth of Detroit, and wealthy Detroiters owned slaves for the first 120 years of the city’s existence.
Bill McGraw, Deadline Detroit 2012
See our free pdf books on U.S. History 1865-1900
Using Poor Laws to Regulate Race in Providence in the 1820s
One duty of members of the town council of Providence, RI in 1825 was to “bind out the children of blacks”; taking children as young as three away from families and indenturing them to other families. Not only was it ethically questionable – it had no basis in law.
Gabriel Loiacono, Process History Blog 2018
The Unmaking of a Racist
The author relates his personal history of leaving Florida in 1954 for Williams College in Massachusetts, where he became aware of his own racist views and of how racism permeated American society.
Charles B. Dew, Chronicle of Higher Education Review 2016
Two years of the ‘Irish slaves’ myth: racism, reductionism and the tradition of diminishing the transatlantic slave trade
The myth of ‘Irish slaves’ and of an ‘equality of suffering’ between enslaved Africans and white Europeans has gone mainstream, appearing everywhere to legitimate racism and to undermine black rights struggles.
Liam Hogan, Open Democracy 2016
Uncovering the roots of racist ideas in America
Contrary to popular conceptions, ignorant and hateful people have not been behind the production and reproduction of racist ideas in America. Instead, racist ideas have usually been produced by some of the most brilliant and cunning minds of each era. And these women and men generally did not produce these ideas because they hated black people. In my book, “Stamped from the Beginning,” I chronicle the entire history of racist ideas, from their origins in 15th-century Europe, through colonial times when early British settlers carried racist ideas to America, all the way to their emergence in the United States and persistence into 21st century.
Ibram X. Kendi, The Conversation 2017
See our Guides to Colleges PDF
Texas Slavery Project
History website. The Texas Slavery Project takes a deep look at the expansion of slavery in the borderlands between the United States and Mexico in the years between 1837 and 1845. Based at the Virginia Center for Digital History, the project offers a number of digital tools that allow users to explore the changing face of slavery in early Texas:
Virginia Center for Digital History 2008
The American Colonization Society: 200 Years of the “Colonizing Trick”
Nicholas Guyatt, Black Perspectives 2016
The County That Closed Its Public Schools Rather Than Desegregate After Brown v. Board of Education
The first wave of resistance [to the ruling] lasted an entire decade, during which time Prince Edward County, Va., school officials closed public schools for five whole years rather than comply with the Supreme Court order to desegregate.
Arica L. Coleman, Time 2018
The curious origins of the ‘Irish slaves’ myth
Irish Americans were slaves once too — or so a historically inaccurate and dangerously misleading internet meme would have you believe.
Natasha Varner, PRI 2017
See our post with Articles from the Early 20th Century on African American Issues
A first look inside the Smithsonian’s African American museum: Stunning views, grand scale
Peggy McGlone, Washington Post, 2016
A History of Race and Racism in America, in 24 Chapters
By Ibram X. Kendi, NY Times, 2017
When W. E. B. Du Bois Was Un-American
In February 1951, at the age of 83, he was arrested, and arraigned in federal court as an agent of the Soviet Union because he had circulated a petition protesting nuclear weapons.
Andrew Lanham, Boston Review 2017
See our free pdf books on U.S. History 20th Century
A History of the Harlem Renaissance
Ten key moments in the boom that changed African-American culture
Cheryl A. Wall, History Today, 2016
Slavery and America’s Legacy of Family Separation
Vanessa M. Holden, Black Perspectives 2018
Slavery and Capitalism
Sven Beckert, Chronicle of Higher Education Review 2014
Jared Hardesty, Unfreedom: Slavery in Colonial Boston
Podcast interview. Jared Hardesty, author of ‘Unfreedom: Slavery and Dependence in Eighteenth-Century Boston’, reveals details about colonial Boston and how its people justified slavery; origins of Boston slaves and where Bostonians purchased them; and, what life was like for enslaved men and women in colonial Boston.
Jared Hardesty, Ben Franklin’s World 2018
Why Emmett Till’s case matters to American history and our future
Paul Gardullo and Lonnie G. Bunch III, CNN 2018
Why Schools Fail To Teach Slavery’s ‘Hard History’
A new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center, titled ‘Teaching Hard History: American Slavery’, is meant to be a resource for teachers who are eager to help their students better understand slavery — not as some “peculiar institution” but as the blood-soaked bedrock on which the United States was built. The report, which is the work of the SPLC’s Teaching Tolerance project, is also an appeal to states, school district leaders and textbook-makers to stop avoiding slavery’s hard truths and lasting impact.
Cory Turner, NPR 2018
Why the extraordinary story of the last slave in America has finally come to light
Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon was written in the 1930s, but has only just been published. Why has it taken so long for the remarkable story of Oluale Kossola to be made public?
Afua Hirsch, Guardian 2018
Slavery, “Civilization,” and Sovereignty: African American and Native American Histories in the Deep South
Historian Barbara Krauthamer speaks in a 1-hour video, sponsored by the Organization of American Historians
Barbara Krauthamer, YouTube 2016
A Dual Emancipation: How Black Freedom Benefited Poor Whites
Keri Leigh Merritt, Black Perspectives 2017
A Slave Auction (1859 Newspaper report)
American history told by contemporaries 1898-1929
African Americans and Early Radio (Go to page 8 in this PDF)
Donna Halper, Old Radio Times, 2008
African slave trade (1500-1870) – Map
Vivid Maps
African-American GIs of WWII: Fighting for democracy abroad and at home
Maria Hohn, The Conversation, 2017
Animated interactive of the history of the Atlantic slave trade
By Andrew Kahn, Jamelle Bouie, Slate, 2015
Between Indenture and Slavery? African indentured laborers in the French West Indies (1852-1862)
Caroline Flory, Francophone Africa, Critical Perspectives
‘Life or death for black travelers’: How fear led to ‘The Negro Motorist Green-Book’
In the 1930s, the freedom of the open road beckoned, but for African Americans traveling in the Jim Crow era, highways could be fraught with peril.
DeNeen L. Brown 2017
‘Fearless’ Ida B. Wells honored by new lynching museum for fighting racial terrorism
DeNeen L. Brown, Washington Post 2018
Hatred Without Borders: When White Supremacy Kills White People
Trimiko Melancon, Black Perspectives 2017
He Used Black People As Guinea Pigs For Years – And The Government Paid For It
This doctor’s experiments tortured poor cancer patients, and he got away with it.
All That’s Interesting 2017
How Redlining’s Racist Effects Lasted for Decades
Emily Badger, NY Times 2017
How slave labor built the state of Florida — decades after the Civil War
Behind the whitewashed history of the Sunshine State
Bryan Bowman and Kathy Roberts Forde, Washington Post 2018
The Origins of Prison Slavery
How Southern whites found replacements for their emancipated slaves in the prison system.
Shane Bauer, Slate 2018
Shackles and Dollars: Historians and economists clash over slavery
Marc Parry, Chronicle of Higher Education Review 2016
The day 30,000 white supremacists in KKK robes marched in the nation’s capital
Terence McArdle, Washington Post 2018
Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X Kendi – review
Even abolitionists don’t emerge unscathed from a fearless, brilliant history of racist thinking spanning 500 years
Davvid Olusoga, Guardian 2017
The forgotten civil rights case that stopped the spread of Jim Crow
How? By focusing on white property rights, not black civil rights.
Elizabeth A. Herbin-Triant, Washington Post 2017
Documenting ‘Slavery by Another Name’ in Texas
An African-American burial ground recently unearthed in Texas reveals details about an ugly chapter in the history of the American South.
Editorial Board, NY Times 2018
Black Enslavement in Canada
Natasha L. Henry, Historica Canada, 2016
Black Lives, White Lies and Emmett Till
By The Editorial Board, NY Times, 2017
Britain’s black history has been shamefully whitewashed
There were many African settlers in Britain even before the Romans, says David Olusoga; a fact that all standard histories have conveniently ‘forgotten’
Hakim Adi, The Spectator, 2017
Buffalo Soldiers
Buffalo Soldiers, like their white counterparts in U.S. Army regiments, were among the first park rangers, in general, and backcountry rangers, in particular, patrolling parts of the West.
National Park Service
Malcolm X first interview for British TV (1963)
3-minute YouTube video
New details in book about Emmett Till’s death prompted officials to reopen investigation
New information published in a 2017 book prompted federal investigators to reopen their probe into the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till in rural Mississippi, according to two people familiar with the case.
Till, a 14-year-old visiting from Chicago, was murdered after he was accused of whistling at and making sexual advances toward a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, during an interaction at Bryant’s grocery store in Money, Miss. The teen was kidnapped Aug. 28, 1955, and was tortured and shot. His mangled body was found days later in the Tallahatchie River.
Kristine Phillips, Wesley Lowery and Devlin Barrett, Washington Post 2018
No, the Irish Were Not Slaves Too
Historian Liam Hogan has spent the last six years debunking the Irish slave myth.
David M. Perry, Pacific Standard 2018
Opening the Racist Closets of History: Seven Well-Meaning Americans
Contrary to popular conceptions, American history does not bequeath a clear-cut battlefield of racists squaring off against antiracists. The history is much more complex and contradictory. Some Americans articulated both antiracist and racist ideas. Some of America’s greatest warriors against anti-Black racism have been some of America’s greatest enforcers of racist ideas.
Ibram X. Kendi, Black Perspectives 2017
How the Suffrage Movement Betrayed Black Women
The suffragist heroes Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony seized control of the feminist narrative of the 19th century. Their influential history of the movement still governs popular understanding of the struggle for women’s rights and will no doubt serve as a touchstone for commemorations that will unfold across the United States around the centennial of the 19th Amendment in 2020
Brent Staples, NY Times 2018
‘Loving’ and the History of Anti-Miscegenation Laws in Virginia and Washington
On November 4 (2016), the story of Mildred and Richard Loving, the couple who inspired the landmark 1967 civil rights case, Loving v. Virginia, which challenged laws prohibiting interracial marriages, will be told on the big screen in the new movie Loving. Before its release, it’s important to understand the world in which they lived. What was it like to marry interracially in a state where it was illegal?
Candice Frederick, NY Public Library 2016
The Forgotten Slaves
Review article of ‘The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America’, by Andres Resendez.
Margaret Ellen Newell, Chronicle of Higher Education 2016
The Hidden History of Indian Slavery in America
Podcast interview with Andres Resendez, author of ‘The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America’.
In the Past Lane Podcast 2016
The Historic Achievement of the Pullman Porter’s Union
The achievements of the Pullman Porter’s Union were a significant civil rights victory for both U.S. labor and the civil liberties of African-Americans. (Brief article, with a link to 1997 journal article).
Livia Gershon 2016
The History the Slaveholders Wanted Us to Forget
Henry Louis Gates Jr., NY Times 2017
Making America White 200 Years Ago
Brandon Byrd examines resistance to the American Colonization Society’s attempts to remove free blacks from the US.
Brandon R. Byrd, Public Books 2017
Malcolm X in Oxford: Black power amid dreaming spires
Stephen Tuck revisits Malcolm X’s historic 1964 speech at the Oxford Union and explains why his words so electrified the audience…
Stephen Tuck, History Extra 2014
Hunting down runaway slaves: The cruel ads of Andrew Jackson and ‘the master class’
“Stop the Runaway,” Andrew Jackson urged in an ad placed in the Tennessee Gazette in October 1804
DeNeen L. Brown, Washington Post 2017
Indiana Emigrants to Liberia
In 1852, the Indiana General Assembly formed the Indiana Colonization Board and began providing funds to help Indiana free blacks emigrate to Liberia on the western coast of Africa. This issue explores black colonization and Indiana’s part in the nationwide movement in the 19th century.
The Indiana Historian Magazine 2000
Indians, Slaves, and Mass Murder: The Hidden History
Review essay of 2 books: ‘The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America’ by Andres Resendez, and ‘An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873’ by Benjamin Madley
Peter Nabokov, NY Review of Books 2016
The Horror of Lynchings Lives On
The time when African-Americans were publicly hanged, burned and dismembered for insisting on their rights or for merely talking back to whites is nearer in history than many Americans understand. The horror of these crimes still weighs heavily on black communities in the South, where lynching memories are often vivid. The anguish is made worse by the realization that some of the killers are still alive and may never be prosecuted.
Editorial Board, NY Times 2016
The last U.S. slave ship was burned to hide its horrors. A storm may have unearthed it.
In the summer of 1860, half a century after the United States banned the trans-Atlantic slave trade, Capt. William Foster sneaked 110 African slaves into Mobile, Ala. — and knew that the floating evidence of the illegal deed could get him killed. The Clotilda, the ship that made the months-long journey, held the telltale signs that it was an illegal slaver: containers for water and food, and the lingering stench of urine and feces and vomit and blood.
Cleve R. Wootson Jr., Washington Post 2018
Chaos On An Adirondack Train:The Case Against Pullman Porter Smith
by Chris Pullman, Adirondack Almanack, 2014
The Little-Known History of the Forced Sterilization of Native American Women
Jane Lawrence documents the forced sterilization of thousands of Native American women by the Indian Health Service in the 1960s and 1970s. (Brief article, with a link to a paper.)
Jane Lawrence, JSTOR Daily 2016
The Long Shadow of Racism at the University of Virginia: From 1817 to the Charlottesville Riots
A year after white-supremacist violence broke out in the university town, UVA grapples with a centuries-old legacy of slavery and racial discrimination.
Adam Harris, Atlantic 2018
A Long-Lost Manuscript Contains a Searing Eyewitness Account of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921
An Oklahoma lawyer details the attack by hundreds of whites on the thriving black neighborhood where hundreds died 95 years ago
Allison Keyes, Smithsonian 2016
Death at an Early Age
Countless sociological studies and official reports have described the dreadful condition of the nation’s ghetto schools in abstract terms, but the general public has no concrete idea of what goes on inside them. Jonathan Kozol recounts his experience as a teacher in the Roxbury section of Boston.
Jonathan Kozol, The Atlantic, 1967
Debunking a Myth: The Irish Were Not Slaves, Too
Liam Stack, NY Times, 2017
Did the Erie Canal help put an end to slavery?
S. Brent Rodriguez Plate, America, The Jesuit Review, 2017
Exploiting black labor after the abolition of slavery
Kathy Roberts Forde, Bryan Bowman, The Conversation 2017
Five myths about Reconstruction
By James W. Loewen, Washington Post, 2016
Forced Migration – Podcast
The Atlantic Slave Trade, and Indian Removal
Sarah Handley-Cousins, DG, 2017
Harriet Tubman on the Twenty & More – Podcast
Episode 10, In the Past Lane, 2016
Hate Map
954 Hate groups are currently operating in the US. Track them with our Hate Map.
Southern Poverty Law Center
In a digital archive of fugitive slave ads, a new portrait of slavery emerges
Joshua Rothman, The Conversation, 2016
In America’s Long History of Slavery, New England Shares the Guilt
Christopher L. Brown, NY Times, 2016
Martha Jones on the Intellectual History of Black Women – Podcast
Martha Jones, Common Ground, 2016
Race and Imperialism in Canada in the 1960s
By Paul Hebert, Black Perspectives, 2017
Roots and the 1970s
By Erica Ball, We’re History, 2016
Tales of African-American History Found in DNA
Carl Zimmer, NY Times, 2016
The Southern Vision of a Vast Empire of Slavery – Podcast
Episode 48, In the Past Lane
The Story of Cudjo Lewis, The Last Living Slave Brought To America
Gabe Paoletti, ATI, 2017
These Summer Resorts Once Offered African Americans Sun, Jazz, Food, and Relaxation During the Jim Crow Era
Evangeline Holland, Edwardian Promenade, 2017
“Education and Crime among Negroes”
The American Review of Reviews Vol. 55, pages 318-20, Mar 1917
New York Dewey Dec. 305.8
“Gathering Clouds along the Color Line”
The Worlds’ Work Vol. 32, pages 232-6, June 1916
Baker, Ray Stannard
New York Dewey Dec. 305.8
“Unconstitutional Segregation”
The New Republic Vol. 13, pages 345-6, Jan 19, 1918
Baldwin, William H. Jr.
New York Dewey Dec. 305.8
“Lynching and Race Relations in the South”
The North American Review Vol. 206, pages 241-50, Aug 1917
Page, Thomas Walker
Boston Dewey Dec. 305.8
“Reasons Why Negroes Go North”
The Survey Vol. 38, pages 226-7, June 2, 1917
New York Dewey Dec. 305.8
“The Race Problem”
The Nation Vol. 99, pages 738-40, Dec 24, 1914
Villard, Oswald Garrison
New York Dewey Dec. 305.8
“My View of Segregation Laws”
The New Republic Vol. 5, pages 113-14, Dec 4, 1915
Washington, Booker T.
New York Dewey Dec. 305.8
“Race Segregation in the Rural South”
The Survey Vol. 33, pages 375-7, Jan 2, 1915
Weatherford, W. D.
New York Dewey Dec. 305.8
California Once Targeted Latinas for Forced Sterilization
In the 20th century, U.S. eugenics programs rendered tens of thousands of people infertile.