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- Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “The Black Box of Race,” The Atlantic (March 16, 2024): LINK. “The ‘black box’ … is a metaphor for the circumscribed universe within which people of African descent have been forced to construct a new identity on this side of the Atlantic.”
- Giovanna Dell’Orto and Darren Sands, “As threats to Black cemeteries persist, a movement to preserve their sacred heritage gains strength,” AP via ABC News (March 14, 2024): LINK. Community members, sorority sisters, and academics are joining together in Washington, D.C., Miami, Long Island, and elsewhere to clean up, restore, and preserve forgotten Black cemeteries.
- Nicholas Kryczka, et al., “Culture Warriors—on Both Sides—Are Wrong About America’s History Classrooms,” Time (March 14, 2024): LINK. “Americans have been subjected to competing caricatures of the country’s history classrooms. Progressives have voiced fears that the typical U.S. history curriculum is a whitewashed fable that suppresses uncomfortable truths about slavery and race. Conservatives have claimed the opposite.” According to a new report from the American Historical Association, “The good news is that neither of these panicked portrayals are accurate.”
- Rayna Reid Rayford, “This Pi Day Let’s Celebrate the First Black Woman to Earn Her PhD in Mathematics,” Essence (March 14, 2024): LINK. Every March 14 (3/14) is celebrated as Pi Day (3.14). In 1943, Martha Euphemia Lofton Hayes became the first Black American woman to earn a PhD in mathematics. She then founded the math department at Miner Teachers College (now the University of the District of Columbia), taught math at several public high schools, and helped end a discriminatory tracking system in the local public schools that placed white students in honors courses and Black students in basic courses.
- Aallyah Wright, “Rural America Has an Eviction Crisis, Too,” Capital B News (March 14, 2024): LINK. A new report in the journal Rural Sociology finds that “Southern [majority-]Black counties have higher eviction filing rates than their white counterparts…. [I]n nearly every rural county, Black renters were overrepresented in eviction filings—even in majority-white counties.”
- CJ Lotz Diego, “A Love Song to Sunday Suppers and Easter Feasts,” Garden and Gun (March 13, 2024): LINK. Kentucky-born writer Crystal Wilkinson discusses her family’s Affrilachian roots in a new book that documents Black country cooking: Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts: Stories and Recipes from Five Generations of Black Country Cooks (Clarkson Potter Publishers, 2024).
- Nikole Hannah-Jones, “The ‘Colorblindness’ Trap: How a Civil Rights Ideal Got Hijacked,” New York Times Magazine (March 13, 2024): LINK. The journalist behind The 1619 Project discusses the rise and fall of Civil Rights Era laws designed to “dismantle the system of racial apartheid and to create policies and programs aimed at repairing its harms.” She argues that, “Over the last 50 years, we have experienced a slow-moving, near-complete unwinding of the idea that this country owes anything to Black Americans for 350 years of legalized slavery and racism. But we have also undergone something far more dangerous: the dismantling of the constitutional tools for undoing racial caste in the United States.”
- Lauren Booker, “For Women’s History Month, Harvard professor Imani Perry lists her top books on inequities women of color face,” Boston Globe (March 12, 2024): LINK. Noted historian Imani Perry suggests four books about the systemic barriers faced by women of color: Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine (2024); Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on Health in America (2023); Getting Me Cheap: How Low Wage Work Traps Women and Girls in Poverty (2022); and Black Women In the U.S. Economy: The Hardest Working Woman (forthcoming).
- Jasmine Minor, “Group pushing for all descendants of slaves in Chicago to have property taxes waived,” ABC Chicago (March 11, 2024): LINK. In Chicago, where Black home ownership is the lowest for any racial group, local activists are pushing for a referendum to waive property taxes for all descendants of enslaved African Americans. (This is a reminder that the legacies of slavery followed the Black people who moved North during the Great Migration.)
- Eda Uzunlar, “Exhibit designer explores complex history of slavery in New Haven and Yale,” Vermont Public (March 7, 2024): LINK. At the New Haven (Connecticut) Museum, a public history curator interprets the intertwined histories of Yale University, New Haven, and slavery by reimagining a New Haven that could have been the site of the nation’s first Black institution of higher education.