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- David Smith, “‘A narrative of triumph’: a powerful 17-acre site in Alabama remembers enslavement,” The Guardian (March 19, 2024): LINK. The Equal Justice Initiative’s Freedom Monument Sculpture Park opens in Montgomery, Alabama, on March 27. It is designed to reflect and magnify the memory of the millions of Black people enslaved in America: “There’s a narrative of triumph that we need to acknowledge and the monument is a gesture toward that, as a physical space but also as a way of naming names, making personal, making human this history.”
- Deborah Barfield Berry, “These new museums (and more) are changing the way Black history is told across America,” USA Today (March 19, 2024): LINK. “Black museums have long been ‘cultural anchors’ in their communities, but it has been only in recent years that more have raised enough money and garnered enough support to open … the institutions matter even more today as lawmakers in some states push to restrict the teaching of Black history and ban some books that tell this history.”
- Cynthia Greenlee, “The Remarkable Untold Story of Sojourner Truth,” Smithsonian Magazine (March 2024): LINK. The author argues that few Americans know the real Sojourner Truth—they only know a half-mythologized speech with the famous refrain, “Ar’n’t I a woman?” Scholars, Truth’s descendants, and community organizers are working to tell a more complex story about the abolitionist.
- Rayna Reid Radford, “Hidden History: Cheryl White Was The First Black Female Jockey. Her Story Is Finally Being Told.” Essence (March 18, 2024): LINK. In 1971, Cheryl White became the first licensed Black female jockey in the United States. But her story is largely unknown—just like those of many other Black jockeys and trainers who contributed to the racing game since the first Kentucky Derby in 1875.
- Jacob Napieralski, “How ghost streams and redlining legacy lead to unfairness in flood risk, in Detroit and elsewhere,” The Conversation (March 19, 2024): LINK. A professor of geology has discovered a hidden contributor to flooding in older, under-invested, low-income neighborhoods: “The combined history of redlining and landscape alteration may still contribute to increased flood risk today. When communities received poor grades, banks, lenders and municipalities neglected those areas’ storm water infrastructure.”
- Adam Mahoney, “How Biden’s Infrastructure Plan Created a ‘Climate Time Bomb’ in Black Neighborhoods,” Capital B News (March 18, 2024): LINK. President Joe Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law was supposed to consider the history of areas like Acre Homes [a large unincorporated Black community north of Houston, Texas] in an attempt to make communities whole again. Instead, according to new reports, several thousand projects have been approved to expand highways, ultimately exacerbating climate concerns.
- Drew Hawkins, “A New Orleans Community Confronts the Racist Roots of a Toxic Highway,” Word in Black (March 18, 2024): LINK. The developers of interstate and local highways often, either intentionally or inadvertently, destroyed or isolated urban Black communities. How to repair the damage decades later is a contentious issue. In New Orleans, several proposals have been ventured to solve the problem of Claiborne Expressway.
- Vince Dixon, “Zillow data find homes owned by Black and Latino Bostonians worth less,” Boston Globe (March 6, 2024): LINK. Boston has a serious racial wealth gap: “Black-owned homes are valued at 18 percent less than white homes” and “white Bostonians hav[e] a net worth that is 19 times higher than Black residents.”
- Deborah G. Plant, “My brother isn’t permitted to read his own story. That’s a remnant of slavery.” Washington Post (March 21, 2024): LINK (may require a free account to read). The author laments that “My [incarcerated] brother Bobby is not allowed to read the Black history that he is integrally a part of, a history that is presented in a book [Of Greed and Glory] that he, himself, helped write.”