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- Lukas Althoff and Hugo Reichardt, “Jim Crow and Black Economic Progress after Slavery,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 139:4 (November 2024): https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjae023. The researchers show that “Black families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War have considerably lower education, income, and wealth than Black families whose ancestors were free before the Civil War. The disparities between the two groups have persisted substantially because most families enslaved until the Civil War lived in states with strict Jim Crow regimes after slavery ended.”
- Mark McKibbin and Denver Brunsman, “Strange Political Bedfellows,” History News Network (October 9, 2024): LINK. The authors dispute the popular but simplistic argument that the Electoral College was adopted directly because of slavery; instead, they draw a more complicated picture of sectional politics: “[Creating the Electoral College] required an active alliance of Northern and Southern delegates. Both the North and South bore responsibility for a presidential election system that buoyed the slave power for the next seven decades and continues to wield antidemocratic influence on our politics to this day.”
- Geoff Holtzman, “Black people were blamed for COVID vaccine hesitancy when access was the problem,” The Philadelphia Inquirer (October 10, 2024): LINK. Data suggests that Black people were less likely than whites to be vaccinated against the coronavirus, not because of they were inherently hesitant, but because of vaccine distribution problems: “In Philadelphia…white people had 570.1% more [vaccine] doses [than their Black counterparts].”
- Savannah Flanagan, “The Troubled History of Medical Harm to Black Women,” Black Perspectives (October 8, 2024): LINK. Black women still face disproportionate risks during pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum. The author bridges the stories of Pleasant (an enslaved women who died in childbirth in 1805) and Kira Johnson (who died in a Los Angeles hospital in 2016): “Separated by two centuries, … both victimized by racist understandings of Black women’s reproductive functions.”
- Akilah Johnson, “Racism was called a health threat. Then came the DEI backlash.” Washington Post via MSN (October 11, 2024): LINK. “A growing number of U.S. institutes created to explore the nexus between racism and health — and the researchers who preside over them — are finding themselves under attack, their missions and funding in peril barely four years after the nation had what many called its ‘racial reckoning.’”
- “Author of ‘The Black Utopians’ on the quest for a better Black existence,” ABC News (October 3, 2024): LINK. Aaron Robertson discusses his new book, The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America (Macmillan, 2024). The book mixes family and national histories to explore how the disillusioned, forgotten, and the persecuted “not merely hold on to life but expand its possibilities and preserve its beauty.” His ultimate question: “What does utopia look like in black?” (emphasis added).
- M. Keith Claybrook, Jr., “Maulana Karenga, Operational Unity, and the Black Power Movement,” Black Perspectives (October 9, 2024): LINK. “There is a history of Black people working across differences.” This article focuses on Maulana Karenga, who both created Kwaanza and developed a theory (and practice) for uniting the work of different Black Power organizations in the 1960s.
- Richard J. Cellini, “It’s My Job To Find the People Harvard Enslaved. It Can’t Outrun History.” Harvard Crimson (October 10, 2024): LINK. The director of the Harvard Slavery Remembrance Program reflects on institutional pressures from some senior university administrators to drop the painful (and possibly embarrassing) work of discovering descendants of Harvard’s connection to slavery. Cellini, who was a featured speaker at the recent Legacies conference in Memphis, says that Harvard (and other colleges) “can’t ignore the facts. Though the University is very old and very rich, it can’t outrun history.”
- Nathaniel Moore, “Civil War Reenactors Aren’t Just Play-Acting. They Expect a War.” New Republic (October 6, 2024): LINK. The author embedded for a day with a group of passionate, white Civil War reenactors in central Virginia. “How much, I wanted to know, does this hobby reflect a passion for history, and how much is it a manifestation of the militant turn of American politics? Would I encounter antebellum nostalgia or even outright denial of slavery’s role in the war? Instead, I found a different — but no less insidious — threat to the health of American democracy.”
- “A Hidden Workforce: Prison Labor, Human Rights, and the Legacy of Slavery,” Aspen Institute (October 11, 2024): LINK. A multidisciplinary panel of journalists, scholars, and practitioners “explore[s] the history and conditions of work for incarcerated people and ideas for creating more humane and dignified work for those behind bars.” Available as a video or a podcast.