In the article below historian Kathleen Thompson describes Taylor Electric Company, founded in 1922 and has the distinction of being the oldest continuously operating Black-owned business in Chicago and one of the oldest in the United States. Taylor Electric Company is one of the oldest family-owned Black businesses in the United States. It is also Chicago’s oldest continuously operating Black-owned […]

The Greenville (South Carolina) Library Desegregation Crisis involved eight African American students who protested the segregated library system in Greenville, South Carolina, from March 1, 1960, to September 9, 1960. The eight students included future civil rights leader and presidential candidate Jesse Jackson, Dorris Wright, Hattie Smith Wright, Elaine Means, Willie Joe Wright, Benjamin Downs, Margaree Seawright Crosby, and Joan […]

The Lycée Victor-Schœlcher is a secondary school located in Fort-du-France, Martinique. Initially built in 1902, the Lycée Victor-Schœlcher has served as the foundational home for significant intellectual figures of Caribbean literary, political, and philosophical traditions including Aimé Césaire, Léon-Gontran Damas, and Frantz Fanon. It is considered the first high school of Martinique. The school’s name refers to nineteenth-century French abolitionist […]