Category: Black History Month

February 17, 2022

Lanaw Benson: An Unusual Manumission Story

Sara Cedar Miller

In James Riker’s definitive history of colonial Harlem, Lanaw Benson makes her only appearance in a footnote. In discussing a four-acre property that included a sliver of the future Central Park, Riker noted that “[David] Waldron sold it, June 6,...

February 15, 2022

Reconceptualizing Justice for the Victims of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre

Nicole Iturriaga

On January 11, 2022, Hughes Van Ellis turned 101 years old. He is quoted in the local Tulsa news as saying, “My birthday cake is sweet, but justice is sweeter.” He, along with Viola Ford Fletcher and Lessie Benningfield Randle,...

February 10, 2022

A Stratum of Sadness That Abides

David Hajdu

One hundred and one years ago, in February 1921, Bert Williams proposed something more radical than it should have been. Williams, a three-decade veteran of the stage at age forty-six, had risen from the woolly ranks of Barbary Coast honky-tonks...

February 9, 2022

Q&A: Scott MacDonald on William Greaves, a Pioneer of African American Filmmaking

William Greaves is one of the most significant and compelling American filmmakers of the past century. Best known for his experimental film about its own making, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One, Greaves was an influential independent documentary filmmaker who produced, directed, shot,...

February 8, 2022

Sidney Poitier and the New York Film Renaissance

By Richard Koszarski

I have been writing and researching the history of motion picture production in New York since the 1970s. Not the image of New York, but the way our local cultural and historical traditions interacted with broader industry trends to create...

February 2, 2022

Joseph L. Graves and Alan Goodman in Conversation with Olivia Treynor on Racism, Not Race

Joseph L. Graves and Alan Goodman’s new book, Racism, Not Race, breaks down crucial myths about race in a highly readable format. Dissecting everything from junk science on athletic ability to the real reasons different populations are more vulnerable to...

July 26, 2021

The Complicated Legacy of Black Patriotism

By Justene Hill Edwards

Black people have been in the United States since before its founding. Though they have fought in every major military conflict in American history, African Americans have engaged in an uphill battle to force this nation to uphold the lofty...

April 14, 2021

Race and the History of Capitalism

By Destin Jenkins and Justin C. Leroy

In 1983, Cedric J. Robinson popularized the term “racial capitalism,” referring to the way that the violent dispossessions inherent to capital accumulation operate by creating, leveraging, and intensifying racial distinctions. But he did not invent the term. It first cohered...

April 14, 2021

Capitalism and the Economic Lives of Enslaved People

By Justene Hill Edwards

In 1805, one of enslaved peoples’ greatest fears came true for a man named Charles Ball. His enslaver sold the thirty-year-old to a slave trader bound for the Carolinas and Georgia, far from his family in Maryland. Ball was funneled...

January 9, 2021

Hubert Harrison and Contemporary Struggles for Racial Equality

By Jeffrey B. Perry

“This long-awaited final volume guides us through the last decade of Harrison’s life, when he played a major role in the political upheavals and cultural transformations that shaped Harlem in the wake of the First World War. Thanks to Perry’s...

December 2, 2020

Video: Introducing Ms. Donna Haskins and Take Back What the Devil Stole

 “Like Karen McCarthy Brown’s Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn, this study of an impossibly ordinary life grabs you and refuses to let go, even as it offers new insights into a hidden spiritual world.” Stephen Prothero, author of Why Liberals...

August 20, 2020

Video: Bruce D. Haynes on “What Makes Harlem Special?”

 “Bruce D. Haynes’s story is a classic American tale—which combines the big themes of history with the gritty reality of a single family’s extraordinary story.” ~Jeffrey Toobin, staff writer at The New Yorker and senior legal analyst at CNN...