BlackPast.org Board Member and newspaper columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. shares his concerns about the prospect of Black history being lost from public memory. He also advances his ideas on how it can be preserved in this nation’s increasingly politically polarized atmosphere. “What happened on September 11th?” My youngest grandson—he was thirteen then—asked me that question two years ago in a […]

Professor Mary Annette Anderson was born on July 27, 1874, in Shoreham, Vermont, to William John Anderson, a formerly enslaved person from Virginia, and Philomine Langlois Anderson, a French Canadian and American Indian from Canada. She had a younger brother named William John Anderson, Jr. Anderson was educated at Northfield Seminary in Massachusetts, a coeducational school located in Franklin County. […]

Keenen Ivory Wayans is a filmmaker, actor, and comedian best known for his comedic satire and for creating the Emmy-winning show In Living Color, a variety show which featured a mostly black cast and helped to launch the careers of many prominent actors and comedians. Born on June 8, 1958, in Harlem, New York City, New York, Keenen Ivory Wayans is […]

Zumbi dos Palmares was a Brazilian Quilombola leader of a group of Afro-Brazilians who lived in maroon communities known as quilombos. He was the last king of the Quilombo dos Palmares, the largest of the quilombos founded by escaped enslaved Afro-Brazilians in what is now Alagoas, Brazil. Zumbi was born in 1655 to a woman named Sabina and an unnamed […]

The Bantu-speaking populations of Western Africa consist of a diverse group of over 500 distinct ethnic groups, all of whom speak various Bantu languages. Between 2000 BCE and 1000 CE, the Bantu undertook a remarkable expansion across the continent, moving south and east from what is now Nigeria. Their strategic migration included the use of the Congo River, which flows […]

Andrii Zastrozhnov/Shutterstock Black students are increasingly less likely to get a first or 2:1 than their white peers, according the latest Ethnic Representation Index for higher education in England and Scotland. This need for better representation for students was the impetus behind the development of the index, first launched in 2022. I began it while deputy vice-chancellor at the University […]

Wesley Coleman, corporate leader and Past Grand Sire Archon of Sigma Pi Phi Fraternity, was born on March 12, 1950, in Halifax, Virginia to Bessie Bowman Coleman and Nathanial Wyatt Coleman. He earned his B.S. degree in business management from Hampton University in Hampton, Virginia in 1971, and his M.B.A. degree from the University of Pittsburgh Katz Graduate School of […]

The Willard Straight Hall Takeover at Cornell University in 1969 was a pivotal moment in the history of student protests and the civil rights movement. The event occurred in Ithaca, New York, between April 19 and April 20, 1969. The primary reason for the protest was to address the racism experienced by African American students at Cornell at the time. […]

For many Black families, summer months can be a relief and a stress. The stress is because of the precariousness of summer programming in Canada. Typically for families with school-aged children, summer planning usually starts in February or March, when most registration begins. The logistics around finding quality summer programming can be challenging. If you are a newcomer to Canada […]

Islam was founded by the Prophet Muhammad in 610 CE in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. Muhammad spread Islam throughout the Arabian Peninsula, including the city of Medina by 622 CE. After his death in 632, Islam began to spread to other parts of the world. It reached North Africa during the second half of the 7th century CE, when the Umayyad […]