Reckoning With Racist ‘Lynch Law’ and Rape Charges, a Century Later

States Like Virginia Are Reexamining Long-Ago Cases on the Path Toward Redress and Redemption

This piece publishes alongside the Zócalo/Mellon Foundation program “How Does Confronting Our History Build a Better Future?” Read a summary of the event and watch the discussion here.

On July 12, 1898 John Henry James’ body, riddled with bullets, hanged from a locust tree. The Virginia man had been in the custody of the Albemarle County sheriff, awaiting grand jury action on a rape allegation, when a mob of 150 people kidnapped and killed him.

James, the story went, sexually assaulted one Julia Hotopp. (I belabor …

by Margaret Burnham | October 25, 2023

Where I Go: Seeing Panama City Through the Eyes of Elders

Experiencing the History of Black Life in the Country Where I Was Born

by Kaysha Corinealdi | October 16, 2023

In 2001, I made my first visit as an adult to Panama City, Panama. The city was both familiar and alien to me. My family migrated to the United States …

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

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

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, …

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 …

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