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- Mike Ludwig, “Students Sue Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders for Silencing Black History,” Truthout (April 21, 2024): LINK. The NAACP has joined a group of teachers, students, and parents from historic Central High School (Little Rock, AR) to challenge a controversial section of the LEARNS Act — a new law championed by the Arkansas governor to promote school privatization and ban “left-wing indoctrination” and “critical race theory” in public schools.
- Laura Sullivan and Nick McMillan, “Historical markers are everywhere in America. Some get history wrong,” NPR (April 21, 2024): LINK. For more than a century, historical markers erected by state and local groups have largely avoided critical scrutiny. NPR has analyzed a database crowdsourced by thousands of hobbyists to understand the distorted history of the Civil War purveyed by these markers, which often “describe the Confederacy in glowing terms, vilify the Union, falsify the reasons for the war [i.e., slavery] or recast Confederate soldiers as the war’s true heroes.”
- Rebekah Barber, “How Black Women in the South Are Reclaiming Space,” Nonprofit Quarterly (April 18, 2024): LINK. Black women in the South are reclaiming public space to tell more honest stories about the legacies of slavery — like Michelle Browder, who purchased the site where gynecologist J. Marion Sims operated on enslaved Black women and turned it into a museum, clinic, and training space; or Jo and Joy Banner, twin sisters who founded an organization to fight the chemical industry in Louisiana’s Cancer Alley and preserve the history of slave resistance.
- Nate Tinner-Williams, “Descendants of Jesuit enslavement launch new research nonprofit,” Black Catholic Messenger (April 22, 2024): LINK. The new organization — the Descendants of Jesuit Enslavement Historical & Genealogical Society — will work to uncover the full history and continuing impact of Jesuit slave-holding (and slave-selling) the United States.
- Dorothy Berry, “Black Archives, Not Archives of Blackness,” Los Angeles Review of Books (April 22, 2024): LINK. A review of Laura E. Helton’s new book, Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History (Columbia University Press, 2024), which explores a “vision of Black public bibliophilia in the first half of the 20th century” through the careers of a half-dozen public and private collectors who “spent their entire lives working institutionally to build fortresses of Black history and possibility.”
- Marc Blanc, “No Place to Make a Vote of Thanks,” History News Network (April 23, 2024): LINK. A history of Black radicalism explored through third-party candidacies for president (ending with Cornel West). The author skips Frederick Douglass — who was a VP candidate for president on the Equal Rights Party ticket in 1872 — and Dick Gregory, who ran as a write-in candidate in 1968.
- Kathryn Palmer, “Will Free Medical School Diversify the Physician Workforce?” Inside Higher Education (April 23, 2024): LINK. “Although a wide body of research shows patients have better health outcomes when treated by a doctor of the same race or ethnicity, the racial diversity of the physician workforce doesn’t reflect the diversity of patients.”
- Lauren Irwin, “Black Americans more concerned than other groups about pollution exposure: Survey,” The Hill (April 16, 2024): LINK. A new Gallup survey reports that Black Americans are far more concerned about environmental pollution and contamination in their communities than White and Hispanic Americans — perhaps because they are more likely to live in toxic neighborhoods, thanks to the legacies of segregation and redlining.