Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Racism
Dubbed the “AAA guide for black people,” the underground travel manual encapsulated how automobile travel expanded — and limited — African American lives under Jim Crow.
Editor's Note: Candacy Taylor is an award-winning author, photographer, and cultural documentarian.
For most of the 1800s, whites in blackface performed in widely popular minstrel shows, creating racist stereotypes that endured for more than a century.
For most of the 1800s, whites in blackface performed in widely popular minstrel shows, creating racist stereotypes that endured for more than a century.
He was a lieutenant in the Army of the United States: he saw no reason to sit in the back of the bus
ON JULY 6, 1944, Jackie Robinson, a twenty-five-year-old lieutenant, boarded an Army bus at Fort Hood, Texas.
“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 the late 1960s I was a reporter on the staff of a big-city daily newspaper in the border South. My beat was local politics, which at the time had edged into civil rights and sometimes racial confrontations. The issues were clear.
More than the Revolution, more than the Constitutional Convention, it was the crucial test of the American nation. The author of Battle Cry of Freedom, the most successful recent book on the subject, explains why the issues that fired the Civil War are as urgent in 1990 as they were in 1861.
McPherson’s Basic Reading List
Thirty years ago John Howard Griffin, a white Texan, became an itinerant Southern black for four weeks. His account of the experience 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 Sgt. 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. This is in honor of Sgt. William Walker, who was brave enough to act on his belief in his rights.
“Why hasn't the stereotype faded away as real cowboys become less and less typical of Western life? Because we can't or won't do without it, obviously.”
Being a Westerner is not simple. If you live, say, in Los Angeles, you live in the second-largest city in the nation, urban as far as the eye can see in every direction except west.
Whatever you were taught or thought you knew about the post-Civil War era is probably wrong in the light of recent study
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.
Crisis at Central High
by Elizabeth Huckaby
Louisiana State University Press
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.
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.
Coatesville, Pennsylvania, dozed fitfully in the oppressive heat of August. Then two shots rang out, and set off an ugly train of racial violence
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