Author: spirit

Josephine Baker, legend

Born Freda Josephine McDonald in St. Louis, Missouri, Josephine Baker (1906–1975) was an African-American dancer and singer who was “the most successful music hall performer ever to take the stage” (Ebony magazine). Josephine Baker was larger than life: She was the toast of Paris in the 1920s with her trademark banana skirt, a star of stage and […]

The Untold Story of the Integration of Pro Football

(The Forgotten Four (clockwise from top left): Marion Motley, Bill Willis, Kenny Washington, Woody Strode) The story of how Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier in 1947 is the stuff of legend. But there’s another story about the desegregation of a professional sport that hardly gets told. A year before Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers, […]

Untold Stories of Black Women in the Suffrage Movement

Whitewashed: Unmasking the World of Whiteness

Gladys Bentley was a non-conforming icon of the 1920’s

Gladys Bentley was a non-conforming icon of the 1920s. Born in Philadelphia in 1907, she moved to New York at age sixteen after being harassed in her community for dressing in boys’ clothes and having feelings for her female teacher. Bentley heard that Harry Hansberry’s Clam House in Manhattan was looking for a male pianist […]

The Midnight Ride of Sybil Ludington

he British are coming, the British are coming!” This cry likely brings to mind the name of Paul Revere, immortalized in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poetry. Students learn about the legendary ride as early as elementary school, but Revere’s younger, female counterpart is rarely mentioned: Sybil Ludington. On April 26, 1777, when she was just 16 […]

Kenny Washington Breaks the NFL’s Color Barrier

If you were able to go back in time and tell sports fans of the late 1930s and early 1940s that a young Black athlete would become an American icon for breaking a color barrier, they’d likely think you were talking about Kenny Washington. Few would imagine you were describing Jackie Robinson, who followed Washington at […]

Revisiting the murder of Louis Allen

US Steel Eastern Kentucky City Building

center

The Corbin Expulsion of All Black People in 1919

center

US Supreme Court OK’s Jim Crow Laws

Knoxville’s Red Summer: The Riot of 1919

The Ocoee Massacre: A Documentary Film

Rosewood Series – A History

1921 – History Class Inadvertently Omits This American Made Distruction

White Terrorist Against Black People

George Washington Carver: An Uncommon Life

Dawn of Day: Stories from the Underground Railroad

Charles Leonhardt, an abolitionist who fought beside John Brown during his abolitionist crusade in Territorial Kansas. Leonhardt was one of the leaders of the militant abolitionists in Kansas Territory and helped to form one the first Free State guerilla forces in Kansas Territory. John James Smith (1820 – 1906) was a barber shop owner, abolitionist, a three-term […]

John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry

John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry (formerly spelled Harper’s Ferry) was an effort by abolitionist John Brown, from October 16 to 18, 1859, to initiate a slave revolt in Southern states by taking over the United States arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. It has been called the dress rehearsal for, or Tragic Prelude to, the Civil War. Brown’s party of 22 was defeated by a company of U.S. Marines, led […]

Racist Attempt to Stop Civil Rights Act of 1957

On August 28, 1957, United States Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina began a filibuster, or extended speech, intended to stop the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957. It began at 8:54 p.m. and lasted until 9:12 p.m. the following day, for a total length of 24 hours and 18 minutes. This made the filibuster the longest single-person filibuster in U.S. Senate […]

15 Untold Black History Inventors

The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment

The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male (informally referred to as the “Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment,” the “Tuskegee Syphilis Study,” the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the African American Male,” the “U.S. Public Health Service Syphilis Study at Tuskegee,” or the “Tuskegee Experiment”) was an ethically unjustified study conducted between 1932 and 1972 by the United States […]

History of Jim Crow

Check out the closing part of this documentary that highlights the extreme racist practice against black athletes by the Washington Football Team, until it was forced by the U.S. Federal Government since it accepted federal funds to build their new football stadium in 1962.

Dr. Daniel Hale Williams First Black Heart Surgeon In America | Timeline

How Dave Chappelle’s Great-Grandfather Made History Before Him – Real American History

<center> President Woodrow Wilson (lynching’s, mob violence, Jim Crow Laws)Redlining Education for BlacksWWI USA Military Service Apartheid

1963: The Year That Changed Everything

Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy

1619 Project – New York Times

Kate Brown vs Washington-Alexandria Railroad Case

February 8, 1868 As a Senate employee “in charge of the ladies’ retiring room,” Kate Brown worked hard. Senators noticed her “lady-like character” and described her as “intelligent” and “refined.” She was not a rebel or a troublemaker, but on a chilly afternoon in 1868 Kate Brown rebelled. Her story is a nearly forgotten chapter […]

Before Rosa Parks, There Was Claudette Colvin

Retiree Claudette Colvin was 15 the day she refused to give up her seat on the bus. “My head was just too full of black history, you know, the oppression that we went through,” she says. Few people know the story of Claudette Colvin: When she was 15, she refused to move to the back […]

Public Schools Are Increasingly More Deficient

From 1957 to 1970, I attended class everyday in the Los Angeles Unified School District. It was not until I was in my middle ages that I believed there was a better option. Attending school when I did was everything because there was highly valued socialization. There were of course rudimentary academic things that sparked […]

WILLIE O’REE, 1ST NHL PLAYER

Willie Eldon O’Ree, CM ONB (born October 15, 1935) is a Canadian former professional ice hockey player, best known for being the first black player in the National Hockey League. O’Ree played as a winger for the Boston Bruins. O’Ree is referred to as the “Jackie Robinson of ice hockey” for breaking the black colour barrier in the sport,[1][NB 1] and has stated publicly that he had met Jackie Robinson when he […]

NASA Legend – Katherine Johnson

Katherine Coleman Goble Johnson (August 26, 1918 – February 24, 2020) was an American mathematician whose calculations of orbital mechanics as a NASA employee were critical to the success of the first and subsequent U.S. crewed spaceflights.[2] During her 35-year career at NASA and its predecessor, she earned a reputation for mastering complex manual calculations […]

Frank “Sugar Chile” Robinson – Caldonia

Robinson was born in Detroit, Michigan. At an early age he showed unusual gifts singing the blues and accompanying himself on the piano.[2] According to contemporary newsreels, he was self-taught and managed to use techniques including slapping the keys with elbows and fists.[3] He won a talent show at the Paradise Theatre in Detroit at […]

Quakers, 1st group opposing human oppression and slave trade

Quakers, also known as “The Society of Friends,” have a long history of abolition. But it was four Pennsylvania Friends from Germantown who wrote the initial protest in the 17th century. They saw the slave trade as a grave injustice against their fellow man and used the Golden Rule to argue against such inhumane treatment; […]

Bessie Coleman, June of 1921, receives international air pilot’s license

Born in Atlanta, Texas in 1892, Bessie Coleman grew up in a world of harsh poverty, discrimination and segregation. She moved to Chicago at 23 to seek her fortune, but found little opportunity there as well. Wild tales of flying exploits from returning WWI soldiers first inspired her to explore aviation, but she faced a […]

1919 Race Riots in Chicago: A look back 100 years later

Beaumont Race Riot of 1943: 75 Years Later

Elaine Massacre: The bloodiest racial conflict in U.S. history | Dark History | New York Post

American Oppression

1946 Columbia, TN Race Riot