The Read Drug Store Sit-Ins, also known as the Baltimore Sit-Ins, occurred on January 20, 1953, in Baltimore, Maryland. The sit-ins were organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and students from Morgan State College (Now Morgan State University) against the two locations of Read Drug Store, Howard and Lexington, in downtown Baltimore, and the Northwood Shopping Center in […]

In the following article University of Louisville historian John McLeod surveys illustrative episodes in the long history of the Sidis, or African-Indians (Indians of African Ancestry) dating back to the thirteenth century. There have been people of African descent in the Indian subcontinent for centuries. Some scholars believe that the Harappans or Indus people, who in the third millennium BCE […]

The Charleston Hospital Strike occurred between March 19, 1969, and June 27, 1969, in Charleston, South Carolina. The leading causes of the strike were pay inequality based on race, racial discrimination, and racial segregation of African American hospital workers. On March 17, 1969, a group of African American employees at Medical College Hospital (Now Medical University of South Carolina) met […]

Louis-Benoit Zamor is best known for helping to send French Aristocrat Madame Jeanne du Barry to the guillotine during the French Revolution (1789-1794). Born in Chittagong, India (present-day Bengal), probably of Siddi ancestry (the Siddi were Indians of African descent), Zamor’s birth year is generally accepted as 1762. Some accounts report he was purchased by the Prince de Conti; others […]

The Memphis Sanitation Strike occurred between February 12 and April 16, 1968. The sanitation strike was called in response to the deaths of sanitation workers Echol Cole and Robert Walker and in response to the racial discrimination that Black sanitation workers experienced. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, who was organizing the Poor People’s Campaign at the time, came to Memphis […]

Kelley V. Board of Education was a lawsuit filed in 1955 by several Black families to desegregate Nashville public schools. Zephaniah Alexander Looby, a prominent Nashville Black attorney, joined Thurgood Marshall, Director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Legal and Educational Fund, to file suit against Nashville public schools in federal district court to bring […]

Thomas Fountain Blue, the first African American to head a public library in the United States, was also a civic, educational, and religious leader. Blue was born in Farmville, Virginia, on March 6, 1866, to Noah Blue, a carpenter, and Henry Ann Crawley Blue. They were parents of two other children, Alice Blue and Charles Blue. Blue enrolled in Hampton […]

Journalist, publisher, farmer, legal advisor, and political activist Ralph D. de Magne de Chabert, the son of Louis de Chabert and Laura de Chabert, was born in Saint Croix, Danish West Indies, on January 12, 1890. However, the 1940 US Census indicates his date of birth about 1893 in Saint Croix. De Chabert was interested in agriculture and spent much […]

On October 1, 2023, California Governor Gavin Newsom chose well-known labor organizer and political strategist Laphonza Butler to be the next US Senator from California, following the death of long-serving Senator Dianne Feinstein on September 29, 2023. Butler, who was sworn in by Vice President Kamala Harris at the US Capitol on October 3, 2023, is the first openly LGBT […]

On the night of June 16, 1966, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Chair Stokely Carmichael (Later Kwame Ture) proclaimed to the crowd, “We been saying freedom for six years and we ain’t got nothin’. What we got to start saying now is Black Power! We want Black Power.” With these words Carmichael addressed 1,500 people at a rally in Greenwood, […]