African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church — Bunk History

Methodist Episcopal Church leaders: five white men and one Black man.

Black Methodists, White Church

How freedmen navigated an unofficially segregated Methodist Episcopal Church.

by Paul William Harris via OUPblog on May 22, 2023

C. G. Garrett photographed with five Black contemporaries outside of a building in Columbia, South Carolina.

Riding With Mr. Washington

How my great-grandfather invented himself at the end of Reconstruction.

by David Nicholson via The American Scholar on August 22, 2024

An 18th-century building travels Feb. 10 from its location on the campus of William & Mary to Colonial Williamsburg’s Historic Area.

Schools for Black American Children Predated the Revolution

Efforts in early America to educate Black children offer us a template for addressing educational inequality today.

by Grant Stanton via Made By History on February 27, 2023

A Denmark Vesey monument is seen in Hampton Park in Charleston, S.C., in 2015.

The Formerly Enslaved Man Whose Faith Inspired a Slave Revolt

Denmark Vesey expressed the Bible’s anti-slavery messages.

by Jeremy Schipper via Made By History on April 7, 2022

African American mother and children in peach vignette, c. 1885.

A Mother’s Influence

How African American women represented Black motherhood in the early nineteenth century.

by Crystal Webster via Lapham’s Quarterly on June 9, 2021

Beyond Speeches and Leaders

The role of Black churches in the Reconstruction of the United States.

by Nicole Myers Turner via Muster on August 14, 2020

How the Daughters and Granddaughters of Former Slaves Secured Voting Rights for All

A look at the question of race versus gender in the quest for universal suffrage.

by Martha S. Jones via Smithsonian on March 8, 2019

Born a Slave, Emma Ray Was The Saint of Seattle’s Slums

Emma Ray was a leader in battles against poverty, and for temperance.

by Lorraine McConaghy via Crosscut on February 26, 2016

For most of her 74 years, Ruth Ann Hills took a certain innocent pride in her family’s story and its place in Staten Island history. Generations of her family had resided in Mariners Harbor on the island’s North Shore. She and her brother David Thomas live in the house their grandfather built on Van Pelt Avenue. They had found Black ancestors on Staten Island as far back as the 1700s, and incredibly they had all eluded slavery. Or so Hills thought. All of that changed one day in 2021, when Hills received a visit from a filmmaker. Heather Quinlan was working on a documentary about a nearby graveyard. Over the course of her genealogical research, Quinlan had discovered that one of the people buried there was Hills’ great-great-great-grandfather. Neither Hills nor Thomas had ever heard of the man, Benjamin Prine, but his death in 1900 at the age of 106 had been covered by the New York Times and the wire services. Prine, a U.S. veteran of the War of 1812, had been the last enslaved person born on Staten Island, Quinlan told them. A photograph of a man, seated, holding a cane. The photograph has a long caption beneath, that is headlined "THEY CAN'T TAKE THAT AWAY FROM ME." Hills' and Thomas' great-great-great-grandfather, Benjamin Prine. Staten Island Historical Society. Prine had once been enslaved by Peter Van Pelt, a highly influential Dutch Reformed Church minister – meaning that the street on which the siblings now live took its name from the same white family that enslaved their ancestor. “I thought I was a big history buff. ‘Oh, I know about history,’” Hills said. “I guess I was naive.” A crosswalk scene underneath two large street signs that both read "Van Pelt Av." The intersection of Van Pelt Avenue and Forest Avenue on Staten Island. Reece T. Williams/Gothamist

How the Remains of Formerly Enslaved People Came to Rest Beneath a Staten Island Strip Mall

Benjamin Prine's descendants didn’t know about their family ties – or their connection to his enslaver.

by Arun Venugopal via Gothamist on February 9, 2023

Black and white photo of Ishmael Reed as a child in Willert Park Courts, 1943.

The Buffalo I Knew

The city is at a crossroads. Which path will it take?

by Ishmael Reed via New York Review of Books on July 9, 2022

Illustration of enslaved workers harvesting sugar cane.

Ethical US Consumers Struggled to Pressure the Sugar Industry to Abandon Slavery

Before the Civil War, US activists sought to combat slavery through sugar boycotts. Instead, consumption grew.

by Calvin Schermerhorn via The Conversation on January 12, 2022

Margaret Watson, 93, touches a section of the Birwood Wall that runs behind her house

Built to Keep Black From White

Eighty years after a segregation wall rose in Detroit, America remains divided. That's not an accident.

by Erin Einhorn, Olivia Lewis via NBC News on July 19, 2021

Still from upcoming short film “Write No History” by Black Quantum Futurism, 2021.

Project: Time Capsule

Time capsules unearthed at affordable housing sites offer alternative, lost, and otherwise obscured histories.

by Camae Ayewa, Rasheedah Phillips via E-Flux on June 14, 2021

The Mystery of ‘Harriet Cole’

Whose body was harvested to create a spectacular anatomical specimen, and did that person know they would be on display more than a century later?

by Jessica Leigh Hester via Atlas Obscura on March 18, 2021

Camp meeting

The Long Road to White Christians' Trumpism

Any effective soul-searching must take into account the history of white American Christian support for white supremacist power.

by Elizabeth L. Jemison via Arc: Religion, Politics, Et Cetera on December 8, 2020

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