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- Regie Stites, “‘Sundown Towns’— Black Workers and White Segregation in the Rural Midwest,” Medium (March 7, 2024): LINK (may require a free subscription). The author explores the history of his small hometown in central Illinois: a “sundown town” where coal miners and mine owners pushed out Black residents around the turn of the 20th century.
- Christopher Harress, “Africatown, founded by formerly enslaved people in Alabama, faces new threats from industrial pollution,” Oregon Live (March 6, 2024): LINK. The legacies of slavery and environmental racism collide in Africatown, a historic community founded by formerly enslaved African Americans near Mobile that’s fighting against a freight rail expansion and industries emitting toxic waste. (Black residents of Shiloh, at the other end of Alabama, are also fighting environmental racism.)
- Kaitlyn Bancroft, “RootsTech: The 10 Million Names Project is recovering identities of enslaved Africans. Here’s how you can help,” The Church News (March 6, 2024): LINK. American Ancestors—a program of the New England Historic Genealogical Society—is using its massive genealogical database to help recover the names and histories of enslaved African Americans.
- Barry Greene, Jr., “Richmond’s New Shockoe Project Will Memorialize the City’s Role in the Slave Trade,” Next City (March 4, 2024): LINK. Richmond, Virginia, will use 10 acres of a historic neighborhood to build a museum and educational space that will recognize the city’s role as the second-largest slave market in the United States. The city, once infamous for the Confederate statues that lined Monument Avenue, continues to consider new ways to publicly commemorate its slavery past.
- Donna M. Owens, “Black historical interpreters act to keep history alive as some work to erase it,” NBC News (February 28, 2024): LINK. Re-enactors continue to embody the past through the lens of Black history, including a staff member at the African American Civil War Museum in Washington, D.C., and an actress who interprets Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, and Billie Holiday.
- Vicki Crawford, “The women who stood with Martin Luther King Jr. and sustained a movement for social change,” The Conversation (March 8, 2023): LINK. The focus on men like MLK has eclipsed many of the women who were also major players in the Civil Rights Movement, such as Coretta Scott King, Septima Clark, Dorothy Cotton, Fannie Lou Hamer, and others.
- Zahara Hill, “History should have done better by Claudette Colvin,” MSNBC (March 1, 2024): LINK. It is unclear why Claudette Colvin—who refused to give up a bus seat nine months before Rosa Parks—was left out of the fight to desegregate Montgomery’s bus system. It may have been colorism or a teenage pregnancy. Today she says, “I’m a piece of the puzzle that was left out in telling the whole Montgomery Bus Boycott story.”
- Manny Zapata, “Highlighting the Afro in Afro-Latinidad,” The Education Trust (March 4, 2024): LINK. “Latinos are a multiracial ethnic group, but the experiences of Afro-Latinos, who make up 12% of the U.S. Latino adult population, often differ from those of other Latinos, on account of their race, skin tone, and other factors, including the enduring legacy of slavery and racism in the U.S. and Latin America.”
- Brandon Tensley, “How the Legacy of a Reconstruction-Era Massacre Shapes Voting Rights Today,” Capital B News (March 4, 2024): LINK. The Opelousas Massacre of 1868 left 250 people dead, most of them new African American citizens. The white rioters used violence to suppress the Black franchise. Now, Black women in Louisiana are working to expand fair representation across a state where 33% of the population is Black but only two congressional districts have Black majorities.
- Nick Corasaniti, “Racial Turnout Gap Has Widened With a Weakened Voting Rights Act, Study Finds,” New York Times (March 2, 2024): LINK. A study by the Brennan Center for Justice has discovered that the turnout gap between Black and white voters in counties once subject to “preclearance” under the Voting Rights Act has grown by 11% since Shelly v. Holder (2013): “In the 2020 election, 9.3 million more people would have voted if nonwhite voters had participated at the same rate as white voters.”
- Rhiannon Giddens, “Black artistry is woven into the fabric of country music. It belongs to everyone,” The Guardian (February 27, 2024): LINK. One of Beyoncé’s back-up musicians on “Texas Hold ’Em” explains how capitalism and racism have warped the country music genre: “After 100 years of erasure, false narratives, and racism built into the country industry, it’s important to shine a light on the Black co-creation of country music.”
- Zeeshan Alsem, “The release of these Underground Railroad stamps couldn’t come at a better time,” MSNBC (March 8, 2024): LINK. The United States Postal Service has just released a series of stamps honoring African Americans who obtained freedom through the Underground Railroad. Among others, the stamps honor Harriet Jacobsm, the abolitionist and writer who was notoriously abused by her enslaver. The author draws links between the Underground Railroad and the current network that is growing to assist women seeking abortions.
Update from the CIC Network:
- Sarah Fisher, “Roots Commission tells the truth about history,” Trinitonian (March 7, 2024): LINK. CIC member Trinity University (San Antonio, Texas) is the third school in Texas to join Universities Studying Slavery, seeking to learn more about its founders’ ties to white supremacy.