Without images of African Americans, depictions of important military moments are incomplete.

The Fight to Desegregate Savannah Beach

The Gold Dust Twins advertisements used caricatured Black children to sell cleaning products

From Phillis Wheatley Peters to Ida B. Wells-Barnett, leading Black women activists defined their public images through their portraits to advance their ideas.

The influence of writer and musician Gil Scott-Heron is widely felt. However, assessing his legacy involves figuring out just what kind of artist he was.

This article explores the intersection of Blackness, queerness, and disco. It highlights the ways in which creative space of dance and music offered Black queer and transgendered people safe opportuni...

Photos from the 1965 Selma to Montgomery March often downplay the transformative role of community-rooted power in securing voting rights for all Americans.

Enslaved refugees sought freedom in Union contraband camps during the American Civil War

The story of Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill exemplify the perpetuation of the silencing or mistreatment of Black women.

It was never built. And thus, in our age of toppling monuments, it never came down. But in October 1868, Thomas Nast imagined a monument to racial violence that continues to haunt us.

Students at Jackson State stood together in 1970 to display their power and resilience after being attacked by law enforcement.

NC Mutual provided financial support to African American communities for over a century

NC Mutual provided financial support to African American communities for over a century

Mamie Mobley-Till never imagined that her son's, Emmett Till, 1955 trip to family in the Mississippi Delta would result in her son’s untimely death, yet she turned her grief into action, which ultimat...

Neither wind nor rain could stop a band of Ohio mothers from securing the education their children deserved. While Brown v. Board of Education (1954) was supposed to have ended school segregation, thi...

“Buffalo Soldiers”—The 92nd Infantry Division—in Italy, 1944-45

The Civilian Conservation Corps, one of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s most popular New Deal programs, provided work, education, and recreation opportunities for hundreds of thousands of young African Am...

Sojourner Truth, Anna Julia Cooper, the National Association of Colored Women, and the foundations of Black women’s struggles today.

How race has shaped our memory of the Civil War and Emancipation. This article explores the erection of monuments commemorating the American Civil War. It argues that memorials play a part in collective memory because they are the product of a tangible, anguished shared history and underscore how the nation is still divided over the memory of the Civil War, slavery, and emancipation.

What do Thurgood Marshall, Malcolm X, and Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) have in common? The internationalism of American civil rights activism. This article explores the lesser-known internationalis...

The Gold Dust Twins advertisements used caricatured Black children to sell cleaning products

Years after breaking the color barriers in baseball and tennis, Jackie Robinson and Althea Gibson changed another sport.

Black Women and the Winning of World War II

Los Angeles 1992, policing, and the long history of urban protests in the United States. This article explores the explosion of urban protest in the early 1990s, following the Rodney King trial. The a...

This biographical article details the ascendancy of Wallace Delaney Muhammad to become the Imam of American Islam, taking the title Imam Warith Dean Mohammed, leader of the Nation of Islam. Once he ca...

Jesse Jackson and the radicalism of 1980s Black presidential politics. It details Jackson’s early involvement with SCLC and Operation Breadbasket, an initiative of Martin Luther King, Jr. It shows how...

What constitutes terrorism? How the Philadelphia police turned a neighborhood to ashes and the desecration of the remains of the dead that followed.

Known as "The Father of Black History," Carter Godwin Woodson (1875-1950) co-founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASALH) in 1915. The article explores Woodson’s life and le...

The story of Black women and track and field through the lens of one of the early greats, Wilma Rudolph.

Celebrating the Silver Jubilee of the Tuskegee Institute in Four Photographs

Much of what is widely embraced about the famous activist and orator, Sojourner Truth, is mythology, while the truth lives in the shadows. This article explores the myths that formed around Truth in w...

Once enslaved and later the first Black American to graduate from West Point, Henry Ossian Flipper is America’s overlooked, trailblazing antihero.

In the 1970s, Venezuela had the highest growth rate and lowest inequality in Latin America. Thanks to an oil bonanza, the government was able to spend more money (in absolute terms) from 1974 to 1979 ...

His victories, entrepreneurial spirit, and flamboyance in and out of the ring made Sugar Ray Robinson the quintessential modern athlete.

Pittsburgh’s segregated Hill District became a hub of jazz and Black culture. Charles “Teenie” Harris, the renowned photographer and chronicler of Black life, captured it all.

The famed choreographer used his art to emphasize the universal resonance of African American stories.

The struggle of university students to build Black Studies on campus, in their communities, and throughout the nation.

TikTok video by Picturing Black History

In 1948, President Truman ordered the integration of the United States' armed forces an act that transformed American society.

Despite systemic racism, Walter Morris and the "Triple Nickles" forced their way into parachute training and took one major step toward integration. This article details how Black American soldiers be...

In view of the decades-long close alliance between the Christian Right and the Republican Party, it may not have been a surprise when President Donald J. Trump established a White House Faith Office i...

Before beginning his Hall of Fame baseball career, Jackie Robinson served as a second lieutenant in the United States Army, enduring a court martial in pursuit of equal rights for Black soldiers.

“If we had known then what we know now of these swells, and the tides they create, we would have known earlier the terrors of the storm which these swells...told us in unerring language was coming.” —...

The influence of writer and musician Gil Scott-Heron is widely felt. However, assessing his legacy involves figuring out just what kind of artist he was.

How a shared love of baseball fostered a meaningful friendship and a spirit of resistance. This essay explores the history behind a photo of Nat King Cole and Orestes “Minnie” Minoso and it depicts th...

Photographer Ben Shahn captures the lives of Black sharecropper families in Little Rock, Arkansas one Sunday in 1935

From Robert F. Williams and Huey Newton to President Richard Nixon, this article explores three moments where Black Liberation movements converged, and diverged, with Revolutionary China. The article ...

Charlotte Hawkins Brown and Alice Freeman Palmer: A Portrait of Two American Women Educators