Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
African-American History
QUESTIONING THE MYSTERIES OF HER OWN FAMILY, THE AUTHOR FINDS ANSWERS THAT AFFECT US ALL.
In 1916, when Margaret Morris was a little girl living in Washington, D.C., she lost her family and they lost her. First her mother died at the age of 41. Then her father, uncles, aunts, sister, brothers, cousins, and even grandmother vanished.
The struggles and torments of a forgotten class in antebellum America: black slaveowners
In the 1640s, John Casor was brought from Africa to America, where he toiled as a servant for a Virginia landowner.
Deep South states are taking the lead in promoting landmarks of a 300-year heritage of oppression and triumph, and they’re drawing visitors from around the world.
Kate is waiting for us by the kitchen garden. Her owner, Benjamin Powell, has warned us that she “often has a case of the grumps,” so we approach her cautiously.
They were the first black men to fight in the Civil War. They were the first to serve alongside whites. And they were the first to die.
I had long been of the opinion that this race had a right to kill rebels.” Colonel James M.
A child of the South's "Lost Cause," Truman broke with his convictions to make civil rights a concern of the national government for the first time since Reconstruction. In so doing, he changed the nation forever.
“I think one man is just as good as another,” he said, “as long as he’s honest and decent and not a nigger or a Chinaman.” Yet Truman broke with his convictions to make civil rights a concern of the national g
In 1932, the Communist International paid to send a cast of American blacks to Moscow to make a movie about American racial injustice. The scheme backfired.
In 1932, while Scarface, Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
In an age when the best black artists were lucky to exhibit their work at state fairs, Henry Ossawa Tanner was accepted by the most selective jury in France.
Dr. Philip Bellefleur had been headmaster of the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf for about three years when he found the painting in 1970.
30 years ago, John Howard Griffin, a white Texan, became an itinerant Southern black for four weeks. His account of the experience, "Black like Me," galvanized the nation.
On a sunny November day in 1959, a tall, brown-haired Texan entered the home of a New Orleans friend. Five days later, an unemployed, bald black man walked out.
The United States had promised black soldiers that they would be paid as much as whites. Sergeant Walker believed that promise.
This is in honor of Sergeant William Walker, of the 3d South Carolina Infantry Regiment, a young black soldier who believed in the United States government’s promises of equal rights.
You Asked for It
When American Heritage suggested last year that I put together the article that became “101 Things Every College Graduate Should Know about American History,” I accepted the assignment eagerly.
This is not a test. It’s the real thing.
How precise is the educated American’s understanding of the history of our country? I don’t mean exact knowledge of minor dates, or small details about the terms of laws, or questions like “Who was secretary of war in 1851?” ( Answer: Charles M.
Twenty years ago blacks were virtually disenfranchised throughout the South. Now their votes may elect our next President.
JESSE JACKSON’S impressive performance during the long primary season of 1984 has made one thing absolutely clear: If the Democratic candidate hopes to unseat Ronald Reagan in November, he will have to count heavily on black votes.
Whatever you were taught or thought you knew about the post-Civil War era is probably wrong in the light of recent study
Thousands of them sided with Great Britain, only to become the wandering children of the American Revolution
IN THE EARLY summer of 1775 the rebeb of Virginia evicted their royalist governor, John Murray, Earl of Dunmore, from his capital at Williamsburg and drove him to refuge aboard a British warship.
A century after passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, many Southern blacks still were denied the vote. In 1965 Martin Luther King, Jr, set out to change that—by marching through the heart of Alabama.
From the frozen steps of Brown Chapel they could see the car moving toward them down Sylvan Street, past the clapboard homes and bleak, red-brick apartments that dotted the Negro section of Selma, Alabama.
How the mistress of the plantation became a slave
“WE’RE USED to living around ‘em. You Northerners aren’t. You don’t know anything about ‘em.” This is or was the all-purpose utterance of white Southerners about blacks.
THE BLACK SLAVE DRIVER
Wise planters of the ante-bellum South never relaxed their search for talent among their slaves. The ambitious, intelligent, and proficient were winnowed out and recruited for positions of trust and responsibility.
In the 19th Century, white performers invented the minstrel show, the first uniquely American entertainment form
NOTE: this article has been updated and reissued in the Winter 2019 issue. Click for the new version.
New Light on a Much-Loved Myth
The election of a peanut-growing President has evoked much journalistic analysis of his rural Southern roots.
An Interview with Marian Anderson
Behind-the-scenes records reveal how the Supreme Court reached its fateful desegregation decisions
A TALE OF RECONSTRUCTION
Of the turbulent career of Pinckney B. S. Pinchback, adventurer, operator, and first black governor of Louisiana. He reminds one powerfully, says the author, of the late Adam Clay ton Powell, Jr.
His name seems pure invention —Pinckney B. S. Pinchback. It sounds so much like pinchbeck , dictionary-defined as “counterfeit or spurious,” that one suspects a joke by political enemies.
The black laborers on John Williams’ plantation never seemed to leave or complain. It took some digging to find out why
When one weary woman refused to be harassed out of her seat in the bus, the whole shaky edifice of Jim Crow began to totter
In 1955,
For some men the only solution to the dilemma of blacks and whites together was for the blacks to go back where they came from
One morning Cadet Johnson Whittaker was found battered and bleeding, trussed to his barracks bed. Who had done it, and why?
West Point, April 7, 1880. At reveille—6 A.M. —it was discovered that Cadet Johnson Chesnut Whittaker was not in formation. This caused a slight stir of interest, for Whittaker was an unusual cadet.
With the current wave of interest in black history, authentic Negro heroes have been eagerly sought in the American past.
The author and director of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Green Pastures” recalls the struggle to get a play about a black God produced in 1930.
Just forty years ago this month—on the evening of February 26, 1930—at Broadway’s old Mansfield Theatre, there was uttered for the first time the most awesome entrance cue in all of theatrical history. “Gangway!” shouted the angel Gabriel. “Gangway for de Lawd God Jehovah!”
An African-American physician and his family were arrested for murder in Detroit after defending their home against an angry mob of whites. Then attorney Clarence Darrow came to their defense.
A Negro cavalry regiment was John J. Pershing’s “home” in the service. From it came his nickname, and he never lost his affection for—or failed to champion—the valorous colored troopers he led.
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