Breaking News! History in the Making
Hundreds Dedicate Lynching Marker to Anthony Crawford in Abbeville, South Carolina
A century ago, a white mob beat, stabbed, shot, and hung Mr. Crawford, a 56-year-old black farmer, in the Abbeville town square, after he dared to argue with a white merchant over the price of cottonseed. The patriarch of a large, multi-generational family, and the owner of 427 acres of land, Mr. Crawford was a successful farmer and leader whose murder had long-reaching effects. In October 2016, hundreds gathered in Abbeville for a Freedom School, during which college students, activists, and leaders led discussions about our country’s history of racial injustice and its contemporary legacies. Those present included more than 100 of Anthony Crawford’s descendants, who wore black armbands and buttons in his memory, as well as members of the families of Emmett Till, Ida B. Wells, and Malcolm X, who came to lend support and words of encouragement.
After 100 Years Of Challenges, The 1st Nat’l Black History Museum Is Here
Black history has finally taking its rightful place within the Smithsonian Institution with the National Museum of African American History and Culture’s grand opening in September 2016. Discover the 100-year history of the project, take a virtual tour, watch the full dedication ceremony and video interviews.
Restoring Black History
Celebrated historian Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. explains the historical significance of the new National Museum of African American History and Culture, a project 100 years in the making, opening September 2016 on the National Mall in Washington, DC.
Upcoming Film Festivals Featuring Black Filmmakers’ Movies
Below are the dates and sites of upcoming film festivals around the country and samples of the movies by and about African Americans that you can expect to see there: Service To Man won the American Black Film Festival’s Grand Jury Prize in Miami in June 2016. It will screen this weekend in both the…
Our Museum’s Response to Milwaukee’s Recent Unrest
Because America’s Black Holocaust Museum (ABHM) is based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, visitors to ABHM online have inquired about our response to the recent unrest in a predominantly black neighborhood in our city. Though not immediately apparent on the ABHM website, our museum’s principal spokesperson has been helping local, national, and international press explain these events…
Efforts by Counties and Towns to Purge Minority Voters From Rolls
Sparta, Georgia, is purging its voter rolls of African Americans. Before the 1965 Voting Rights Act was gutted by the Supreme Court, this is precisely the sort of electoral maneuver that once would have needed Justice Department approval before it could be put in effect. And this is but one of many places in the USA where such seemingly small but effective efforts at voter suppression are taking place ahead of November’s presidential election.
Federal Court Strikes Down NC Voter ID Requirement
A federal appeals court decisively struck down North Carolina’s voter identification law on Friday, saying its provisions deliberately “target African-Americans with almost surgical precision” in an effort to depress black turnout at the polls. Much of Wisconsin’s voter identification law was also struck down.
White allies show solidarity with Black Lives Matter
In the wake of the recent police killings of two black men, Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, public opinion, particularly among white people, has started to shift. Forty new chapters of a national network of groups and individuals organizing white people for racial justice –– Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) –– have formed in the weeks since the incidents.
It’s Time to Ring the Alarm About White Nationalism
The media reports on Islamic terrorism and individual ambushes of police, but it has largely overlooked increasingly brazen demonstrations and violence by the Far Right, treating each as a separate unconnected episode. But are they? In the last year, the level of violence has ramped up dramatically.
212 Slaves Died on the São José Ship; National Museum Shares Their Story
The first items recovered from the sunken slave ship have arrived in Washington, D.C., and will be displayed at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. By Allison Keyes, theRoot.com Paul Gardullo lifted an iron ballast from a Portuguese slave ship that sank in 1794 out of a crate Wednesday morning and…
U.S. spending on prisons grew at three times rate of school spending: report
U.S. state and local spending on prisons and jails grew at three times the rate of spending on schools over the last 33 years as the number of Americans behind bars ballooned under a spate of harsh sentencing laws
In the Turmoil Over Race and Policing, Children Pay a Steep Emotional Price
By YAMICHE ALCINDOR, New York Times In the past week alone, there was the 4-year-old girl in Falcon Heights, Minn., who was captured on video consoling her mother after they watched a police officer shoot the mother’s boyfriend through the window of a car. And there was the 15-year-old boy in Baton Rouge, La., who sobbed uncontrollably in…
Study Supports Suspicion That Police Are More Likely to Use Force on Blacks
A new study has found that the race of the person being stopped by police officers is significant in terms of how much force is used. The study of thousands of use-of-force episodes from police departments across the nation has concluded what many people have long thought, but which could not be proved because of a lack of data: African-Americans are far more likely than whites and other groups to be the victims of use of force by the police, even when racial disparities in crime are taken into account.
What White America Fails to See
By Michael Eric Dyson, Op-Ed Contributor, New York Times IT is clear that you, white America, will never understand us. We are a nation of nearly 40 million black souls inside a nation of more than 320 million people. We don’t all think the same, feel the same, love, learn, live or even die the same.…
Critics of Police Welcome Facebook Live and Other Tools to Stream Video
After back-to-back killings of black men by police officers this week, scores of African-Americans declared on social media that they would be equipping themselves with a powerful tool: FacebookLive.
Did a Fear of Slave Revolts Drive American Independence?
FOR more than two centuries, we have been reading the Declaration of Independence wrong. Or rather, we’ve been celebrating the Declaration as people in the 19th and 20th centuries have told us we should, but not the Declaration as Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams wrote it. To them, separation from Britain was as much, if not more, about racial fear and exclusion as it was about inalienable rights.
Pillars of Black Media, Once Vibrant, Now Fighting for Survival
When Johnson Publishing, a black-founded and owned company, announced a little more than two weeks ago that it had sold Ebony and Jet to a private equity firm in Texas, there was a sense of loss. Traditional media companies have struggled for years to adapt to a digital world, but the pressure on black-owned media has been even more acute.
Black Holocaust Museum convenes diverse group for film/dialogue series
ABHM’s White Frame/Black Frame film and dialogue series brought together people of different races, ages and genders to discover the hidden roots of the very different realities experienced by black and white Americans and to talk about the role institutional racism plays in their lives.
Jack Daniel’s Embraces a Hidden Ingredient: Help From a Slave
On its 150th anniversary, the Jack Daniel’s Distillery, home to one of the world’s best-selling whiskeys, has begun telling a new story. Daniel, the company now says, learned distilling from an enslaved black man, Nearis Green.
BuzzFeed Features Dr. Cameron and ABHM in “How to Survive a Lynching”
Lynching, in the American imagination, is considered to be solely the provenance of the Confederacy. But one particular souvenir photo, taken in Marion, Indiana, in 1930 has served as the most glaring visual reminder of the country’s decades-long spectacle of racism and public murder. The photo of the lynching of two Indiana teenagers would never grace the pages of the local paper. But that image is still everywhere. This article explains the background of the photo, what became of the sole survivor of that lynching, and the relevance of that event today.
Grand Jury Declines to Indict Cop Who Slammed Teen Girl to Ground
A grand jury declined to indict a white McKinney, Texas, policeman who slammed a teenage girl to the ground at a pool party. A bystander’s video showed the officer aggressively tossing the 15-year-old black girl to the ground before pinning her with his knees. Casebolt also pulled his gun on two other youths who came running to help the girl.