Frederick Douglass

Cailloux’s valor, and the Black troops he led in battle, electrified northern opinion and gave federal race policy a strong jolt.

In his new book, The Crooked Path to Abolition, James Oakes argues that the Constitution was an antislavery document.

On the ways that people have conflated freedom with whiteness but pays too little attention to the force of freedom as a concept.

Historians have demonstrated how central racism has been to the formation of the U.S. But many of those same ideas have also been vital to combating white supremacy.

If colorblindness rests on the claim that the civil rights movement changed everything, the idea that racism is in our DNA borders on a fatalistic proposition that it changed nothing.

The island was once a place of working-class ingenuity and Black daring.

We know why they were built and why they have to come down.

For Ralph Waldo Emerson, political activism was full of empty gestures done in bad faith. Abolition called for true heroism.

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.

Leading conservative pundits today are pounding themes that were popular among opponents of Reconstruction.

When African Americans allied themselves with the British, the Patriots were enraged, and they acted.

Pittsburgh’s Lower Hill District was razed by the federal government 65 years ago. Now developers are testing the question of how to correct for a racist past.

This year’s Juneteenth commemorations must take a deeper look at the history of Black self-liberation to understand what emancipation really means.

A new history charts the radical agitation around Black rights and freedom back to the early nineteenth century. 

The pre-Civil War North was a landscape not of unremitting white supremacy but of persistent struggles over racial justice by both Blacks and whites.

1619, 1776, and the politics of the past.

John Marshall Harlan's relationship with an enslaved man who grew up in his home showed how respect could transcend barriers and point a path to freedom.

Fixating on Black vaccine skepticism obscures a rich history of Black medical and scientific innovation.

A new book tells the forgotten story of fugitive slaves who found freedom south of the border.

Why are Chicago’s race riots of 1919 overlooked in the city’s collective memory? A new project tells the stories of the 38 killed, and the legacy of racism in the U.S.