Tag: African Americans
Reverend William Barber’s Pastoral Letter to the Republican Party
When the NYPD Gets Desperate
Reverend Barber’s Pastoral Letter to the Democratic Party
EDITOR’S NOTE: Bishop William J. Barber, II wrote this open pastoral letter to the Democrats following the midterm elections. Next week, TheNation.com will publish his letter to Republican leadership.
How Saidiya Hartman Changed the Study of Black Life
Saidiya Hartman has shaped studies of Black life for over two decades. Her first book, 1997’s Scenes of Subjection, argued that slavery was foundational to the American project and its notions of liberty. Her follow-up, 2006’s Lose Your Mother, combines elements of historiography and memoir in exploring the experience and legacy of enslavement. Here she first used a speculative method of writing history given the silences of the archive. And her most recent book,
The New History Wars – The Atlantic
E
ven by the rancorous standards of the academy, the August eruption at the American Historical Association was nasty and personal.
The August edition of the association’s monthly magazine featured, as usual, a short essay by the association’s president, James H. Sweet, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Within hours of its publication, an outrage volcano erupted on social media. A professor at Cornell vented about the author’s “white gaze.” A historian at the University of San
How Black Landowners in the South Are Recovering Lost Generational Wealth
Piney Woods, N.C., is one of those small, quiet, rural communities you might pass on a drive up North. Blocks of lush grass, farmland, and forests are bisected by a single asphalt road; it’s not uncommon to find a tortoise or two lazing on the empty street, unafraid of potential traffic.
These untouched stretches of green are an underrealized beauty. At one point known as Free Union, Piney Woods was founded well before the Civil War by Black folk
The Death and Life of My Father, Donald S. Kelley
Thulani Davis’s Freedom Visions | The Nation
On May 24, 1861, the fate of the Civil War was unclear. The Confederacy was formed in large part to defend slavery, but the Union was not yet committed to ending the chattel regime. That did not deter three enslaved people—Frank Baker, James Townsend, and Shepard Mallory—from doing their part to change the meaning of the conflict. Leased out to construct Confederate defenses in Virginia,
Imani Perry’s Capacious History of the South
In a 1971 issue of Ebony magazine dedicated to exploring “The South Today,” its publisher, John H. Johnson, wrote: “Long before there was a United States of America, there was a Southland.” For many in his generation who had participated in the civil rights movement, the South was a zone of both oppression and liberation—it was the country they knew even if they lived in the North. For
Edafe Okporo’s Manifesto for the Migrant
When Edafe Okporo was released from a New Jersey immigration detention center in 2017, he had nowhere to go. He spent a few nights wandering in Newark Penn Station, dozing on benches and in corners, and then found shelter at a nearby YMCA. He had no money, no phone, knew nobody, and, besides a few hours in a back room of JFK airport, had never been in the United States as a free man.