The True Story of Emperor Shields Green, the ‘Most Mysterious’ Harpers Ferry Raider

The Black Abolitionist’s Sacrifice in Joining John Brown Was Greater Than Cinematic Myth

Since John Brown’s invasion of Harpers Ferry, Virginia (today West Virginia) in 1859, little attention has been paid to the small band of men who followed him.

Sure, here and there, a writer has attempted to tell the stories of Brown’s raiders—that little army of highly principled and passionate men, many of them young abolitionists who shared their leader’s vision for the redemption of the nation from the powerful interests of chattel slavery. With neither payment nor promise of success, the Harpers Ferry raiders, failing to launch a liberation movement in …

by Louis A. DeCaro, Jr. | March 4, 2021

The Black Scholar Who Gave Up Her Family to Earn Her Ph.D.

In the Early to Mid-1900s, Historian Marion Thompson Wright Had to Contend With the Prefeminist Rules and Culture of Howard University

by Graham Russell Gao Hodges | April 4, 2019

Marion Thompson Wright is best known as the first female African-American to earn a doctorate in history. Her 1940 dissertation, defended at Teachers College at Columbia University—The Education of Negroes …

The ‘Messiah’ Mayor Who Believed in Cleveland When No One Else Did

Carl Stokes, the First African American to Lead a Big City, Was Both a Realist and a Showman

By J. Mark Souther | March 22, 2018

On June 24, 1969, the mayor of Cleveland, Ohio, Carl Stokes, held a press conference on a railroad trestle, one of two bridges damaged when an oil slick caught fire …

The Black-Owned Alabama Plantation That Taught Me the Value of Home

After Emancipation, Ex-Slaves Took Over the Cotton Fields. Today Their Descendants Still Cherish the Land.

By Sydney Nathans | February 8, 2018

By the time I was eight years old, in 1948, my parents, my sister, and I had lived in five different states and had moved more often than that. My …

Black History