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- Maya Jokhadze, “Remnants of Normalized Racism: Historical Racism Violently Bleeds Into Today,” Medium (November 21, 2024): LINK. “In a world where racism is still as (if not even more) prevalent than it was in 1965, we could all learn from [James] Baldwin that repairing racist beliefs is an intensely emotional process. Racism was a foundation of society — in slavery and later in segregation — and Baldwin argues that shifting from these previously normalized ideals cannot be done overnight.”
- Julie Denesha, “Restoration of a historic Black church in Parkville gives congregants renewed hope,” NPR (November 22, 2024): LINK. A church built by formerly enslaved people in Parkville, Missouri, is one of several being restored through grants from the National Trust’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund. (The Fund is also supporting the restoration of historic Black cemeteries.)
- Jennifer Porter Gore, “Study: Life Expectancy of Black People Shortens,” Word in Black (November 22, 2024): LINK. “A study of life expectancy trends in the U.S. released [before Thanksgiving] has found that the gap between Black and white lifespans has nearly doubled over the last two decades, exacerbated by geographic and racial health disparities—and reversing decades of a slow but gradual narrowing of the gap.”
- Jennifer Berry Hawes and Mollie Simon, “Segregation Academies in Mississippi are Benefiting from Public Dollars, as They Did in the 1960s,” ProPublica (November 22, 2024): LINK. “ProPublica identified 20 schools in the state that likely opened as segregation academies and have received almost $10 million over the past six years from the state’s tax credit donation program.”
- Keshler Thibert, “The lives that unfolded on a former plantation in Prince George’s County,” Greater Greater Washington (November 26, 2024): LINK. Lord Baltimore’s plantation in Prince George’s County, Maryland, is still struggling to recover from the 2008 financial crisis. The nonprofit foundation that is working to re-open the plantation to the public is struggling to balance two separate stories: the wealthy, white landowners and the enslaved people who worked the land whose descendants still inhabit its surroundings.
- Colin Gordon, “Trump’s next HUD secretary would have a lot to do to address the history of racist housing policy—and Trump’s own comments and history suggest that’s unlikely,” The Conversation (November 26, 2024): LINK. A public policy scholar reviews the long history of “patchwork apartheid”: restrictions that allowed private contractors to prevent African Americans and other people of color from occupying homes in “protected” neighborhoods.
- Garrick McFadden, “Celebrating Soul Food’s Essential Place on Black Culture’s Mount Rushmore,” Level (November 26, 2024): LINK. “Those who had been enslaved needed to supplement the meager scraps that the slavers provided to them. Men, women, and children forced to do back-breaking labor from before the sun rose until after it went down needed more than the paltry allowance these greedy slavers afforded them. They needed soul food.”
- John Eligon, “Why Black Americans Searching for Their Roots Should Look to Angola,” New York Times (December 1, 2024): LINK. “When President Biden travels to Angola this week, he is scheduled to visit the National Slavery Museum near the capital, Luanda, to highlight the bond between the two nations that was born out of slavery.” (Note: most historians contend that the majority of enslaved Africans in North American came from West Africa; the slave-trading route from Angola more often ended in Brazil.)