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- Jon Swaine and Jeremy B. Merrill, “Amid anti-DEI push, National Park Service rewrites history of Underground Railroad,” Washington Post (April 6, 2025): LINK. A “review of websites operated by the National Park Service…found that edits on dozens of pages since Trump’s inauguration have already softened descriptions of some of the most shameful moments of the nation’s past. Some were edited to remove references to slavery. On other pages, statements on the historic struggle of Black Americans for their rights were cut or softened, as were references to present-day echoes of racial division.”
- Wendy L. Wilson, “‘America in Black’: The Plan To Erase Black History Forever,” BET (April 3, 2025): LINK. “One of the most controversial topics being argued across the political aisle today involves state law makers and politicians who have combined efforts to ensure that African American history courses stay out of the classroom. Across the nation, historians, educators, parents, and others are protesting that Black history deserves to be taught and not just relegated to one month of the year.”
- Chandra Childers, “The ongoing influence of slavery and Jim Crow means high poverty rates and low economic mobility in the South,” Economic Policy Institute (April 3, 2025): LINK. Part 4 of a detailed report on economic inequality. This installment focuses on “efforts to continue exploiting Black workers [which] led to racist anti-worker policies that continue to maintain…high levels of inequality for workers of all racial and ethnic backgrounds in most Southern states.”
- Sujata Srinivasan, “‘Complicity in injustice’: New Haven church wrestles with its connection to slavery 200 years later,” Connecticut Public Radio (April 3, 2025): LINK. An Episcopal “church connected to Lucy and Lois, documented as the final two enslaved people sold in New Haven [CT] in 1825, recently held a ‘Service of Lamentation and Healing’ to honor their stories of heartbreak and resilience.” Part of an ongoing effort by many denominations to reckon with the legacies of slavery.
- Leslie M. Harris, “Black soldiers on both sides of the Revolutionary War,” Boston Globe (April 3, 2025): LINK. “Slavery was so central to the European occupation of the Americas that when the colonists went to war against Great Britain in 1775, their most potent metaphor for their subservient political position was that of enslavement…. When the Revolutionary War began, [actual] enslaved people throughout the Colonies took advantage of the chaos of war to make common cause with those [on both sides] who would offer freedom.”
- Pamela Wood, “Maryland lawmakers approve commission to study slavery reparations,” Baltimore Banner (April 2, 2025): LINK. “Maryland lawmakers approved creating a commission to study reparations for slavery [on Wednesday, which]…represented the culmination of years of work from [Del. Aletheia] McCaskill and other lawmakers…. Maryland become[s] the third state in the nation to study reparations.”
- Sara Safransky, et al., “Land reparations are possible—and over 225 U.S. communities are already working to make amends for slavery and colonization,” The Conversation (April 1, 2025): LINK. Since 2021, a research team of geographers has “been documenting and analyzing over 225 examples of reparative programs underway in U.S. cities, states and regions. Notably, over half of them center land return.”
- Rachel Reed, “The afterlife of slavery in the law,” Harvard Law Today (April 1, 2025): LINK. NYU law professor Devon Carbado argues that “[s]lavery is not just a historical event that happened in America’s past…[but] a ‘structural phenomenon’ with an afterlife—one that continues to facilitate racial inequality in the U.S., even in the absence of intentional discrimination or bad actors.”
- “Empowering a Thriving Black Middle Class,” Urban Institute (March 24, 2025): LINK. Findings from the Urban Institute’s Black Family Thriving Initiative. “‘[M]iddle class’ is a surprisingly subjective term in the United States. And for Black families, defining who is middle class is even more difficult…. [Researchers say that] given the extensive legacy of enslavement, sharecropping, residential and school segregation, mass incarceration, and continued everyday racial discrimination in policies and practices…‘talking about [middle-class status] and not including that historical context is very dangerous.’”