Education and History

Education & History Index

Quarles Bio-Chronology Christian Reports to Quarles Negro in the American Revolution

In the Sistine Chapter by Arthur A. Schomburg African American Firsts African American Firsts YouTube

Send contributions to: ChickenBones: A Journal / 13219 Kientz Road / Jarratt, VA 23867 -- I became aware of Rudy Lewis’ labor of love a few short months ago during a visit to Kalamu ya Salaam’s e-drum listserv. As soon as I saw the title of the journal I knew it was about Black folks, and the power of the written word. A quick click took me into a journal that’s long on creativity, highlighting well-known, little known, and a little known writers, and commitment to the empowerment of Black folks. I contacted Rudy to ask if he’d consider publishing some of my work. His response was immediate, and a couple of days after I’d forwarded some poems to him—they were part of ChickenBones. What I didn’t know was that this journal has been surviving for the last five years with very little outside financial support. . . If we want journals like this to “thrive” we need to support them with more than our website hits, praise, and submissions for publication consideration.

—Peace, Mary E. Weems (January 2007)

Some African-American Firsts & Inventions / Ebony's Fifty Influential Figures in African-American History / African Retentions & Black Contributions

Drusilla Dunjee-Houston's

Wonderful Ethiopians of the Cushite Empire, Book II

Origin of Civilization from the Cushites. Edited by Peggy Brooks-Bertram

Review by Larry Obadele Williams

Obituary of Joe Walker Muhammad Speaks International Correspondent

Banished: How Whites Drove Blacks Out of Town in America

                        Film Review by Kam Williams

Uncrowned Queens Instrumental in Righting an 86-Year-Old Injustice

Alberto O. Cappas. An Educational Pledge -- A positive journey for our youth. For Schools: Teachers, Parents, & Students: "One cannot keep hope alive if no plan of action is in place" Check out our Pledge T-Shirt at www.aneducationalpledge.com / Cappas@aol.com

Martin R Delany: A Documentary Reader (Levine)

Martin Robinson Delany and Edward Wilmot Blyden

Race Men and Pioneer Black Nationalists

By Runoko Rashidi

The Black Presence in the Bible: A Selected Bibliography   /   Global News: Politics—Literature & the Arts

Founding Myths: Stories That Hide Our Patriotic Past by Ray Raphael / Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect / The Myth of the Negro Past

Thought of Today—Power that works for righteousness—Finally, there is, somewhere in the Universe a "Power that works for righteousness," and that leads men to do justice to one another. To this power, working upon the hearts and consciences of men, the Negro can always appeal. He has the right upon his side, and in the end the right will prevail. The Negro will, in time, attain to full manhood and citizenship throughout the United States. No better guaranty of this is needed than a comparison of his present with his past. Toward this he must do his part, as lies within his power and his opportunity. But it will be, after all, largely a white man's conflict, fought out in the forum of the public conscience. The Negro, though eager enough when opportunity offered, had comparatively little to do with the abolition of slavery, which was a vastly more formidable task than will be the enforcement of the Fifteenth Amendment. —Charles W. Chestnutt

The Works of William Sanders Scarborough

Black Classicist and Race Leader

Edited by Michele Valerie Ronnick

The Autobiography of William Sanders Scarborough

Clarence J. Munford: N'COBRA Atlantic Slave Traffic   Race and Reparations (book review) Benefits of Whiteness Boukman and His Comrades

Black History Month 2008

We went into slavery a piece of property; we came out American citizens. We went into slavery pagans; we came out Christians. We went into slavery without a language; we came out speaking the proud Anglo-Saxon tongue. We went into slavery with slave chains clanking about our wrists; we came out with the American ballot in our hands. Progress, progress is the law of nature; under God it shall be our eternal guiding star.—Booker Taliaferro Washington

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, — a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.—W. E. B. Du Bois

God and Nature first made us what we are, and then out of our own created genius we make ourselves what we want to be. Follow always that great law. Let the sky and God be our limit and Eternity our measurement.—Marcus Garvey

You know my friends, there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled by the iron feet of oppression ....If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. And if we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong. If we are wrong, Jesus of Nazareth was merely a utopian dreamer that never came down to Earth. If we are wrong, justice is a lie, love has no meaning. And we are determined here in Montgomery to work and fight until justice runs down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream.—M. L. King

<-------artist Chuck Siler

Black History (audio) by Gil Scott-Heron / Gil Scott-Heron & His Music / Army desertion rate highest since 1980

Invention of the White Race Theodore Allen begins Volume 1 by reviewing the many histories of American racism written in the 20th century. Dividing the arguments into the psycho-cultural school and the socio-economic school of thought, he teases out the strengths and flaws of their scholarship. Allen then posits racial oppression as a deliberate ruling-class decision (constantly undergoing renewal) to prevent property-less European Americans from allying themselves with enslaved and free African Americans by offering the European Americans privileges based on white skin. His solution is to study "racism" rather than "race" because studies of race always devolve onto discussions of the body--onto those who are perceived to possess race--and thus avoids the real issue. . . . It is a strong, well researched, tightly argued work. He proves that the "white race" can be "gotten on a technicality" because it was and is indeed an invented rather than a natural category. Amazon Reviewer

Wilson Moses Files:   Andromeda 19 Afrotopia Creative Conflict    Dwight David Eisenhower Teflon Sense of History   Uncle Jeff and His Contempos

The Eternal Linkage of Literature and Society New Orleans and American Exceptionalism   Knowledge and Ignorance: Two Barriers to Learning

The Exhilarating Generosity of Asa Hilliard

By Peggy Brooks-Bertram

Asa G. Hilliard III Obituary   If I Ain't African (Glenis Redmond)

Virginia & the Board of Trade —The ruling class took special pains to be sure that the people they ruled were propagandized in the moral and legal ethos of white-supremacism. Provisions were included for that purpose in the 1705 "Act concerning Servants and Slaves" and in the Act of 1723 "directing the trial of Slaves . . . and for the better government of Negroes, Mulattos, and Indians, bond or free." For consciousness-raising purposes (to prevent "pretense of ignorance"), the laws mandated that parish clerks or churchwardens, once each spring and fall at the close of Sunday service, should read ("publish") these laws in full to the congregants. Sheriffs were ordered to have the same done at the courthouse door at the June or July term of court. . . . The general public was regularly and systematically subjected to official white supremacist agitation. It was to be drummed into the minds of the people that, for the first time, no free African-American was to dare to lift his or her hand against a "Christian, not being a negro, mulatto or Indian"; that African-American freeholders were no longer to be allowed to vote; that the provision of a previous enactment [1691] was being reinforced against the mating of English and Negroes as producing "abominable mixture" and "spurious" issue; that, as provided in the 1723 law for preventing freedom plots by African-American bond-laborers, "any white person . . . found in company with any [illegally congregated] slaves" was to be be fined (along with free African Americans or Indians so offending) with a fine of fifteen shillings, or to "receive, on his, her, or their bare backs, for every such offense, twenty lashes well laid on." —Invention of the White Race (vol. 2, p. 251)       Virginia Expresses Profound Regret

Strange Fruit in Jena

Louisiana Case Looks a Lot Like Duke Lacrosse Frame-Up

By Kam Williams

Nooses and a legal lynching in Jena, Louisiana   YouTube - The Jena Six

State of the Dream  White Privilege Shapes the U.S. State Of Black America   state of black nation 2005   The State of the Dream 2005

Myths of Low-Wage Workers      Skip Gates and the Talented Fifth Responses to Skip Gates The State of HBCUs   The State of Black Journalism

School Security Guards Beat Teen over Cake Spill: Palmdale—It all started with a piece of birthday cake, but it ended up with a high school girl being beaten and expelled. The incident, which occurred last week at Knight High School in Palmdale, was caught on a cell phone camera. Michael Brownlee was live in Palmdale with what the girl and her mother plan to do now— Clearly, Injustice is not just in Jena—Cynthia McKinney Leading the Negro into Modernity

Freedom's Journal

The First African-American Newspaper

By Jacqueline Bacon

Book Review by Kam Williams

James Edward Jackson Jr.—born in Richmond, Va., on 29 November 1914, the son of James and Clara Kersey Jackson—died 1 September 2007 in Brooklyn. His father was a pharmacist. The family lived in Jackson Ward, a segregated section for Richmond blacks. In 1931 (at 16), Jackson entered Virginia Union University. He graduated three years later with a degree in chemistry. In 1937 (at 22), Jackson received a degree in pharmacy from Howard University. But in his last year at Howard, he helped start the Southern Negro Youth Congress, which organized strikes by tobacco workers, mostly black women, who were paid $5 a week. A union representing 5,000 tobacco workers soon gained recognition. . . . Jackson joined the Communist Party in 1947. He held important positions in the Party and was one of 21 Communist Party members who were indicted in 1951, at the height of the McCarthy era, for, among other things, teaching classes on violent revolution. The case was front-page news around the country. In 1952 Jackson became the Southern secretary for the Party and a staunch advocate of civil rights. NYTimes

Moses Files:   Afrotopia Creative Conflict    Dwight David Eisenhower Teflon Sense of History   Uncle Jeff and His Contempos

The Eternal Linkage of Literature and Society New Orleans and American Exceptionalism   Andromeda 19

Founding Myths: Stories That Hide Our Patriotic Past

By Ray Raphael

Supreme Courts Halts Racial Integration—“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” he said. His side of the debate, the chief justice said, was “more faithful to the heritage of Brown,” the landmark 1954 decision that declared school segregation unconstitutional. “When it comes to using race to assign children to schools, history will be heard,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. . . . While Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. joined his opinion on the schools case in full, the fifth member of the majority, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, did not. . . . Justice Kennedy said achieving racial diversity, “avoiding racial isolation” and addressing “the problem of de facto resegregation in schooling” were “compelling interests” that a school district could constitutionally pursue as long as it did so through programs that were sufficiently “narrowly tailored.” . . . “It is not often in the law that so few have so quickly changed so much,” Justice Breyer said. . . . “This is a decision that the court and the nation will come to regret.” . . . Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg signed Justice Breyer’s opinion. Justice Stevens wrote a dissenting opinion of his own, as pointed as it was brief. Linda Greenhouse. Justices Limit the Use of Race in School Plans for Integration. NYTimes

The Works of James McCune Smith

Black Intellectual and Abolitionist

By John Stauffer

Founding Myths: Stories That Hide Our Patriotic Past by Ray Raphael / Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect / The Myth of the Negro Past

On Cecil Brown's Dude, Where's My Black Studies Department -- Thus Africans and Caribbean Negroes were in many cases less radical, even though much of the African American radical tradition comes from immigrants, such as Marcus Garvey, George Padmore, Kwame Toure, Malcolm X and Farrakhan. As Amina Baraka informed me, "We're all West Indians." And this is true because kidnapped Africans were brought to the Caribbean for "the breaking in," then transferred to North America and elsewhere. And we must ask ourselves would we rather have a radical immigrant African in black studies or a reactionary Negro only because he is a Negro. Marvin X, Africa or America: The Emphasis in Black Studies Programs

Radicalism in the South Since Reconstruction

Edited by Chris Green, Rachel Rubin, and James Smethurst

Days of US Slavery Closer Than We Think

Al Sharpton Learns His Forebears Were Thurmonds’ Slaves

Sharpton's great-grandfather was a slave who was owned by relatives of Senator Strom Thurmond,

the longtime arch-segregationist who ran for president as a Dixiecrat in 1948
The Age NYTimes

Slavery And The Making Of America, PBS -- Slavery Atlanta Exposition Address

Educating Our Children / The African World / Inside the Caribbean / Baltimore Page / Support ChickenBones

The Problem of Evil: Slavery, Freedom, And the Ambiguities of American Reform . Edited by Steven Mintz and John Stauffer

A collective effort to present a new kind of moral history, this volume seeks to show how the study of the past can illuminate profound ethical and philosophical issues. More specifically, the contributors address a variety of questions raised by the history of American slavery. How did freedom-personal, civic, and political-become one of the most cherished values in the Western world? How has the language of slavery been applied to other instances of exploitation and depersonalization? To what extent is America's high homicide rate a legacy of slavery? Did the abolitionist movement's tendency to view slavery as a product of sin, rather than as a structural and economic problem, accelerate or impede emancipation? . . . . They also offer fresh perspectives on key individuals, from Benjamin Franklin and Frederick Douglass to Harriet Jacobs and John Brown, and shed new light on the differences between female and male critiques of slavery, the defense of slavery by the South's intellectual elite, and Catholic attitudes toward slavery and abolition.

Carnegie Libraries -- Introduction By R.R. Bowker Carnegie Table Carnegie Sketch Method of Giving Tuskegee Library & R.R. Taylor Bibliography Table

Chronology in Black Librarianship Monroe Work Preface Monroe Work2 Monroe Work Intro Anson Phelps Stokes Fifty Influential Figures

The Commission on Interracial Cooperation / Finding a Way Out of Lynching & Racial Violence / The Tragedy of Lynching

Wreck of the Henrietta Marie --The University of Richmond exhibits artifacts from the Henrietta Marie, a 1699 English merchant slave ship. Discovered by divers in 1972 and fully excavated in 1983, the English merchant slave ship Henrietta Marie is believed to be the world's largest source of tangible objects from the early years of the slave trade. Before sinking in 1700 about 35 miles west of Key West, the ship had dropped off 190 captive Africans to be sold as slaves in Jamaica.

“A Slave Ship Speaks: The Wreck of the Henrietta Marie" continues through May 18 and organized by the Mel Fisher Maritime Heritage Society in Key West, Fla., the exhibit also includes beads, weapons, shackles, iron bars, spoons, bottles and medical supplies recovered from the ship. The sounds of human moans echoed from a CD, playing in tandem with narratives from a former slave and the ship's doctor. Reproduction metal shackles dangled from wooden benches. Times Dispatch / Historical Museum / Museum Exhibits

Robin Kadison Berson. Marching to a Different Drummer: Unrecognized Heroes of American History

Marching Reviews / Anna Julia Cooper / Tunis George Campbell / Elizabeth Freeman / Lucy Craft Laney / Rev. Wesley J. Gaines / Special Order 15

American Women's History -- See Also the bibliographies of these files Anna Julia Cooper / Lucy Craft Laney

Bolden, Tony. The Book of African-American Women: 150 Crusaders, Creators, and Uplifters. Adams Media Corporation, 1996.

Kazickas, Jurate, and Lynn Sherr. Susan B. Anthony Slept Here. A Guide to American Women's Landmarks. Random House, 1994

Nevergold, Barbara A. Seals and Peggy Brooks-Bertram. Uncrowned Queens: African American Community Builders. Uncrowned Queens, 2002.

Weatherford, Doris. American Women's History. Prentice Hall General Reference, 1994

The General Assembly of Virginia Prohibits the Teaching of Slaves, Free Negroes, or Mulattoes to Read or Write, 1831

Frank Snowden Now An Ancestor

Major Scholar of Blacks in Antiquity

author of Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience

& Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks.

Virginia & the Board of Trade —The ruling class took special pains to be sure that the people they ruled were propagandized in the moral and legal ethos of white-supremacism. Provisions were included for that purpose in the 1705 "Act concerning Servants and Slaves" and in the Act of 1723 "directing the trial of Slaves . . . and for the better government of Negroes, Mulattos, and Indians, bond or free." For consciousness-raising purposes (to prevent "pretense of ignorance"), the laws mandated that parish clerks or churchwardens, once each spring and fall at the close of Sunday service, should read ("publish") these laws in full to the congregants. Sheriffs were ordered to have the same done at the courthouse door at the June or July term of court. . . . The general public was regularly and systematically subjected to official white supremacist agitation. It was to be drummed into the minds of the people that, for the first time, no free African-American was to dare to lift his or her hand against a "Christian, not being a negro, mulatto or Indian"; that African-American freeholders were no longer to be allowed to vote; that the provision of a previous enactment [1691] was being reinforced against the mating of English and Negroes as producing "abominable mixture" and "spurious" issue; that, as provided in the 1723 law for preventing freedom plots by African-American bond-laborers, "any white person . . . found in company with any [illegally congregated] slaves" was to be be fined (along with free African Americans or Indians so offending) with a fine of fifteen shillings, or to "receive, on his, her, or their bare backs, for every such offense, twenty lashes well laid on." —Invention of the White Race (vol. 2, p. 251) Virginia Expresses Profound Regret

Ebony's Fifty Influential Figures in African-American History

Four Greats -- Frederick Douglass / W.E.B. Du Bois / Mary McLeod Bethune / Martin Luther King, Jr..

Robert S. Abbott Richard Allen Louis Armstrong Ella Baker James Baldwin Benjamin Banneker Ida B. Wells-Barnett

Ralph J. Bunche George Washington Carver Martin R. Delany Charles R. Drew Paul Laurence Dunbar

Edward Kennedy Ellington Marcus Garvey Prince Hall Fannie Lou Hamer W.C. Handy

Frances E.W. Harper Charles H. Houston Langston Hughes Zora Neale Hurston

Sussex County: A Tale of Three Centuries Public Education in Sussex County in Black and White The Official History of Jerusalem Baptist Church

Lynched Mau Mau Leader Dedan Kimathi

Honored with Statue in Nairobi -- His Remains Have Yet To Be Found

Milton Allimadi: The Hearts of Darkness / Inventing Africa: New York Times / Times Concocted 'Darkest Africa'

Uncle Jeff and His Contempos / Teflon Sense of History / Race in US Politics Syllabus / Banneker and Jefferson / Thomas Jefferson's Negro Family

The Propaganda of History / Commonwealth of Virginia Expresses Profound Regret