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African American artists

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Zora Neale Hurston browsing books at a book fair, looking at a book called "American Stuff."

The Zora Neale Hurston We Don’t Talk About

In the new nonfiction collection “You Don’t Know Us Negroes,” what emerges is a writer who mastered a Black idiom but seldom championed race pride.
by Lauren Michele Jackson via The New Yorker on February 14, 2022
Album cover featuring a sketch of Buck Hammer playing the piano with a cigar in his mouth.

The Discovery of Buck Hammer

A remarkable blues musician emerged from obscurity in 1959, but something about him just didn’t seem right.
by Ted Gioia via The Honest Broker on January 17, 2022
Comedian Charlie Hill on stage with a microphone.

‘Part of Why We Survived’

Is there something in particular about coming from a Native background that makes a person want to write and perform comedy?
by Ian Frazier via New York Review of Books on December 23, 2021
Don Cornelius and the Soul Train Dancers on the dance floor, with fist raised in the Black Power salute, at the end of a show.

Soul Train and the Desire for Black Power

Don Cornelius had faith that Black culture would attract a mass audience, and a belief that Black culture should be in the hands of Black people.
by Mark Anthony Neal via The Nation on December 22, 2021
Jewish actress and filmmaker Ellen Richter, striking a pose on screen while two men give her suspicious looks.

The Silences of the Silent Era

We can’t allow the impression of a historical lack of diversity in the art form to limit access to the industry today.
by Pamela Hutchinson via Current (The Criterion Collection) on November 30, 2021
Gladys Knight and the Pips performing on "The Ed Sullivan Show"

The Misunderstood Talent of Gladys Knight

Gladys Knight and the Pips have always been more beloved by fans than by music historians, but they are essential to the evolution of soul.
by Emily J. Lordi via The New Yorker on August 13, 2021
Diagram relating to Black population and diagram of Georgia occupations by race

The Color Line

W.E.B. Du Bois’s exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition offered him a chance to present the dramatic gains made by Black Americans since the end of slavery.
by Annette Gordon-Reed via New York Review of Books on August 5, 2021
Illustration of a stick figure on a ladder adding to very tall stacks of paper

Living Memory

Black archivists, activists, and artists are fighting for justice and ethical remembrance — and reimagining the archive itself.
by Megan Pillow via Guernica on June 23, 2021
Poet Amanda Gorman recites a piece at Biddy Mason Memorial Park on Aug. 18, 2018, at a gathering to mark the 200th birthday of Biddy Mason, a key figure in the establishment and development of downtown Los Angeles. (Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images)
partner

California Is Finally Confronting Its History of Slavery. Here’s How.

Los Angeles is finding success at reshaping its commemorative landscape.
by Kevin Waite, Sarah Barringer Gordon via Made By History on May 24, 2021
A scrapbook of African American history

A Priceless Archive of Ordinary Life

To preserve Black history, a 19th-century archivist filled hundreds of scrapbooks with newspaper clippings and other materials.
by Cynthia R. Greenlee via The Atlantic on February 9, 2021
Carvings on two whaleteeth (scrimshaw)

The Pleasure Crafts

Everyday people's creation of porn and erotic objects over the centuries.
by Cintra Wilson via New York Review of Books on December 17, 2020
A graphic for the Federal Theatre Project.

Can We Save American Theater by Reviving a Bold Idea from the 1930s?

The Federal Theatre Project put dramatic artists to work — and we could do it again.
by Wendy Smith via The National Book Review on November 1, 2020
A protester holds their hands up in front of a police car in Ferguson, Missouri, on November 25, 2014.

How Being “Woke” Lost Its Meaning

How a Black activist watchword got co-opted in the culture war.
by Aja Romano via Vox on October 9, 2020
Police wielding batons face a crowd of people.

'Fascist Storm Troopers': Racist Police Violence in 1940s America

In 1949, truncheon-wielding police officers descended on the racially integrated concert of singer Paul Robeson.
by Gustavus Stadler via Al Jazeera on September 4, 2020

Why the Black National Anthem Is Lifting Every Voice to Sing

Scholars agree the song, endowed with its deep history of Black pride, speaks to the universal human condition.
by Janelle Harris Dixon via Smithsonian on August 10, 2020
James Baldwin.

The Vow James Baldwin Made to Young Civil Rights Activists

How James Baldwin confronted America's most exceptional lie.
by Eddie S. Glaude Jr. via Literary Hub on July 28, 2020
Billie Holiday performs on stage.

A Brief History of the Policing of Black Music

Harmony Holiday dreams of a Black sound unfettered by white desire.
by Harmony Holiday via Literary Hub on June 19, 2020
partner

Changing Hearts and Minds Won’t Stop Police Violence

The way Americans have long discussed racism is a huge part of the problem.
by Matt Delmont via Made By History on June 5, 2020
Cartoon by Joey Perr; a man in a top hat and holding a monacle studies a sign broadcasting Ella Fitzgerald as music notes fill the air.

What’s Going On

The vexed history of "Night Life" in the New Yorker.
by Phillip Golub via The Drift on May 22, 2020
Dr. Dre.

The Complicated Truths of Dr. Dre’s ‘The Chronic’

No rap album has quite the mythology attached to it—as a game changer, a king maker, a genre expander. But legends aren’t exactly fact.
by Justin Sayles via The Ringer on April 20, 2020
Photographs of Lilian Smith and Frank Yerby.

Frank Yerby and Lillian Smith: Challenging the Myths of Whiteness

Both Southerners. Both all but forgotten. Both, in their own ways, questioned the social constructions of race and white supremacy in their writings.
by Matthew Teutsch via The Bitter Southerner on January 9, 2020
The sun shining through the crown of a lone tree in an agricultural field.

What The Mississippi Delta Teaches Me About Home—And Hope

Finding struggle and resilience on a road trip through the birthplace of the blues.
by Wright Thompson via Fellow Travelers on January 6, 2020

Jitterbugging with Jim Crow

Ninety years ago, young African Americans in the South took up the Lindy Hop. It was an act of resistance and an assertion of freedom.
by Nicole M. Baran via The Bitter Southerner on October 8, 2019

The Hidden Story of Two African American Women

An historian discovers the portraits of two women all bound up in the pages of a 19th-century book.
by Martha S. Jones, Kate Clarke Lemay via The Conversation on September 9, 2019
Solange and Beyonce Knowles at the MTV Video Music Awards, 2007.

‘Give It Up For My Sister’: Beyonce, Solange, and The History of Sibling Acts in Pop

Family dynasties are neither new nor newly influential in pop.
by Danielle Amir Jackson via Longreads on May 20, 2019

In "The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda," Ishmael Reed Revives an Old Debate

If “Hamilton” is subversive, the mischievous Reed asks, what is it subverting?
by Hua Hsu via The New Yorker on January 9, 2019
Two posters of the "We Can Do It!" posters with Rosie the Riveter hang on a wall.

Rosie the Riveter Isn’t Who You Think She Is

While the female factory worker is a pop icon now, the “We Can Do It!” poster was unknown to the American public in the 1940s.
by Erick Trickey via Retropolis on September 3, 2018
Woman playing a guitar, and the cover of the book 'Country Music USA.'

‘Country Music … Was Anything BUT Pure’

On the music’s African-American tributaries, its unpredictable politics, country radio’s woman problem, and working on Ken Burns’ forthcoming doc.
by Bill C. Malone, Will Hermes, Tracey Laird via Longreads on August 1, 2018

Story of Paris Hill Man Connects Maine to ‘Complexities’ of Slave Trade

Torn from his family in Africa, Pedro Tovookan Parris spent the last years of his short life in rural Maine.
by Kelley Bouchard via Press Herald on July 15, 2018

As Goes the South, So Goes the Nation

History haunts, but Alabama changes.
by Imani Perry via Harper’s on July 15, 2018
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