February 25, 2025

Nicole M. Brown in Conversation with Daniel Davis About We Are Each Other’s Business

In the 1960s and 1970s, the Welfare Rights Movement organized at both local and national levels, advocating for poor people’s inclusion, dignity, and autonomy. In We Are Each Other’s Business: Black Women’s Intersectional Political Consumerism During the Chicago Welfare Rights...

February 15, 2025

The Life and Deaths of Illicit Gold in South Africa:

A Global Story

Rosalind C. Morris

Informal miners in South Africa sometimes explain an underground accident by saying that a witch has thrown death in the hole. Death emerged in mid-January, in the partially decomposed bodies of 78 informal miners brought to the surface in the...

February 8, 2025

10 Must-Read Books for Black History Month 2025

Understanding the impact of Black labor is key to understanding Black history and culture, as well as its influence on the United States. This year’s Black History Month theme—African Americans and Labor, free, unfree, vocational, and voluntary—explores how work has...

February 1, 2025

A Hypothetic Interview: When the Artist Considers Himself

James B. Haile III

The Dark Delight of Being Strange is an experimental work combining the elements of Black speculative fiction, Afro-surrealism, Black philosophy, and Black studies to think through the meaning and implications of Black freedom. Dark Delight invites us to imagine and...

January 20, 2025

Lauren Coyle Rosen and Hannibal Lokumbe on Music, Life, and Liberation

For Hannibal Lokumbe, music is a profound source of spiritual liberation. A pathbreaking orchestral composer and visionary jazz musician, Lokumbe composes resonant works that give voice to the freedom struggle of the African diaspora, the broader African American experience, Indigenous...

September 18, 2024

Will Race and Gender Influence Opposition to Kamala Harris?

Matthew Tokeshi

Kamala Harris is the first Black woman to be a major party’s nominee for president. Her candidacy raises the question of whether race and/or gender will be grounds for opposition. In my book, Campaigning While Black, I answer this question...

July 24, 2024

Why History Lessons Are So Threatening to Those with Power

Chana Teeger

Erasure and denial of the past are not the only ways to suppress historical claims and reproduce privilege. Chana Teeger’s research in two racially diverse South African schools shows how the past can be recalled while its legacies are ignored.

June 12, 2024

Beyond Repair:

The Psychic Life of Reparation

Carolyn Laubender

Ten years ago, on June 15, 2014, Ta-Nehishi Coates published his watershed Atlantic article, “The Case for Reparations.” An immediate cultural flashpoint, Coates’s piece sought to legitimize the demand for racial reparation in the contemporary United States by documenting how...

March 27, 2024

Laura E. Helton on Scattered and Fugitive Things

In Scattered and Fugitive Things, Laura E. Helton tells the stories of six Black collectors who played a pivotal role in shaping the early twentieth-century Black archive. From the parlors of the urban North to HBCU reading rooms and branch...

February 28, 2024

Lucy Diggs Slowe on Black Women, the Role of the University, and Democracy

Amy Yeboah Quarkume

Lucy Diggs Slowe (1885–1937) was one of the most remarkable and accomplished figures in Black women’s higher education. Her story is one of resilience, activism, and relentless determination to overcome barriers. She defied societal limitations to become a pioneering educator...

February 26, 2024

Sandhya Shukla on Cross-Cultural Harlem: Reimagining Race and Place

Cross-Cultural Harlem: Reimagining Race and Place, proposes an understanding of Harlem as a place where peoples of different backgrounds collide, interact, and borrow from each other—and cross the borders of ethnic and racial identities and community enclaves in the process....

February 21, 2024

Q&A: Najha Zigbi-Johnson on Mapping Malcolm

Mapping Malcolm is a collection of essays, conversations, and works of art that reinscribes Malcolm X’s memory and legacy across the built environment, forms of contemporary community building, and Black freedom movements as they continue to manifest across New York...