Updated: November 1, 2015 In the article below, Carlton McLellan, PhD, Founding Director of The American Ambassadors Project and Senior Fellow with the Association of Black American Ambassadors (ABAA), briefly describes the history of the more than one hundred and sixty-six black women and men who have led diplomatic delegations as U.S. Ambassadors in one hundred and eight nations around […]

Members of the Black Student Union at Kutztown University in Kutztown, Pa., march in a protest in April 2015. Ben Hasty/MediaNews Group/Reading Eagle via Getty Images Black student unions have been a vital part of many Black college students’ lives for more than 60 years. But since 2024, Black student unions have lost their institutional support, campus space and funding […]

Quintard Taylor Jr., historian, author, and professor, was a leading scholar in the fields of African American history and the history of the American West, as well as the visionary founder of BlackPast.org, the world’s largest online African American and Global African encyclopedia. Born in Brownsville, Tennessee, in 1948, to Quintard, Sr. and Grace Taylor, Taylor discovered his lifelong passion […]

María Remedios del Valle, also known as the “Madre de la Patria” (“Mother of the Homeland”), was a soldier, nurse, and military heroine during the Argentine Wars of Independence against Spain. She became a driving force in the fight for freedom and eventually rose to the rank of sergeant major of the cavalry while serving the United Provinces of the […]

In the article below, Rodney J. Reed, former Grand Sire Archon of Sigma Pi Phi Fraternity and author of A Grand Journey: The History of Sigma Pi Phi Fraternity, 1904-2010, briefly outlines the history of the oldest continuously existing Black Greek-letter fraternity in the United States. Founded on May 15, 1904, Sigma Pi Phi Fraternity, also known as the Boulé, […]

When a nation tells the truth about itself, it gives future generations the tools to do better. That is why the Smithsonian Institution and other museums that document the history and afterlives of slavery are not “out of control”—they are doing the hard, patriotic work of memory. Recent efforts by President Donald Trump to pressure the Smithsonian to deemphasize “how […]

In the summer of 1964, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) reached what the Pittsburgh Courier considered to be a “precedent-shattering ruling” regarding racial bias at the Hughes Tool Company, a manufacturer of drilling equipment in Houston, Texas. There, the Board found the collective bargaining contract between the company and the associated union to be in violation of federal fair […]

Waves of racial tension began to form at the port of Brownsville almost immediately after the erection of dock facilities in 1934. The International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) organized the piers by establishing the all-Black Local 1368 and the all-white Local 1367. In the port’s first six years of operations, shipping companies almost exclusively hired white dock workers. In 1940, the […]

In 1866, newly freed people in Selma, Alabama, came together for a prayer movement. For some time, they met in each other’s homes. During a meeting in the basement of the Hotel Albert, they formed an African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) and one year later, they were admitted into the A.M.E. Connection, making them an official congregation of the global network […]

On December 15, 1966, the United States Justice Department filed suit against Local 53 of the International Association of Heat and Frost Insulators and Asbestos Workers Union of New Orleans, Louisiana. The Justice Department charged that the all-white Local 53 was in violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Title VII of the Act prohibits employment discrimination based on race, […]