History of Racism in the U.S.
“Ignorance, allied with power, is the
most ferocious enemy justice can have.”
James Baldwin
Read
Autherine Lucy Foster, First
Black Student at University of
Alabama, Dies at 92
The New York Times, March 2022
A Call to Remember the
200,000 Black Troops Who
Helped Save the Union
The New York Times, Feb. 2022
A Deadly Riot, and Then 3 Trials,
110 Convictions and 19 Executions
The New York Times, Feb. 2022
A century ago, Mississippi’s
Senate voted to send all the
state’s Black people to Africa
The Washington Post, Feb. 2022
The Slave Trade Didn’t
Come Out of Nowhere
The New York Times, Feb. 2022
200,000 Black men fought in the
Civil War. Some lawmakers want
to give them the Congressional
Gold Medal.
The Washington Post, Feb. 2022
We Still Can’t See American
Slavery for What It Was
The New York Times, Jan. 2022
More than 1,700 congressmen
once enslaved Black people.
This is who they were, and how
they shaped the nation.
The Washington Post, Jan. 2022
A historian says newspapers were
a pillar to uphold the white-supremacist political economy.
Insider, Oct. 2021
A Secret City With a Secret
African American History
The New York Times, June 2022
They Called Her ‘Black Jet’
The Atlantic, April 2022
The only all-Black women’s unit
sent to Europe during WWII is awarded a Congressional medal
The 19th, March 2022
How the Origins of
Epidemiology Are Linked
to the Transatlantic Slave Trade
Time, September 2021
Nantucket Doesn't
Belong to the Preppies
The Atlantic, August 2021
The Harlem Hellfighters Were
War Heroes. Then They Came
Home to Racism.
The New York Times, August 2021
The Complete List of Marxist,
Un-American, Anti-White Things (According to White People)
The Root, June 2021
I Visited A Former Plantation
To Understand Why People Get Married There. All I Saw Was Pain.
BuzzFeed, June 2021
Tulsa isn’t the only race
massacre you were never taught
in school. Here are others.
The Washington Post, June 2021
Forgetting Why We Remember
The New York Times, May 2021
Beyond Tulsa: The Historic
Legacies and Overlooked Stories of America’s ‘Black Wall Streets’
Time Magazine, May 2021
Georgia park wants to ‘tell the truth’ about world’s largest Confederate monument. Others want it gone.
The Washington Post, May 2021
The Victims of the Philadelphia
MOVE Bombing Continue
to be Erased
The New Yorker, May 2021
FBI pressured to answer for
domestic-spying program tied
to Black Panther Fred Hampton’s killing in 1969
The Washington Post, May 2021
The Stealth Sticker Campaign to Expose New York’s History of Slavery
The New York Times, May 2021
Maryland governor grants posthumous pardons for
34 Black lynching victims
Washington Post, May 2021
How Gerrymandering
Began in the US
History, April 2021
The legacy of racism built into Northwest highways and roads
Crosscut, April 2021
A Brief History Of How Racism Shaped Interstate Highways
NPR, April 2021
Race, Policing, and History — Remembering the Freedom House Ambulance Service
New England Journal of Medicine, April 2021
The Crimson Klan
The Harvard Crimson, March 2021
The Eternal Fantasy of
a Racially Virtuous America
The New Republic, March 2021
We were warned about a
divided America 50 years ago.
We ignored the signs.
The Washington Post, March 2021
The History of Slavery in
the U.S. Catholic Church
The Washington Post, March 2021
The Senate filibuster has a racist
past and present. End it so
America can move forward.
USA Today, March 2021
Forging Black Identity in
1986 -We Were the Last of
the Nice Negro Girls
The Atlantic, Feb. 2021
The Magazine That Helped
1920s Kids Navigate Racism
The Atlantic, Feb. 2021
The Real Rosa Parks Story Is
Better Than the Fairy Tale
The New York Times, Feb. 2021
Stories of Slavery, From
Those Who Survived It
The Atlantic, Feb. 2021
Tipping Is a Legacy of Slavery
The New York Times, Feb. 2021
I Desegregated the University
of Georgia. History Is Still in
the Making.
The New York Times, Jan. 2021
The Flawed Genius of
the Constitution
The Atlantic, Sept. 2020
The Whole Story in a Single Photo
The Atlantic Jan. 2021
The Haunting of Tulsa, Okla.
The New York Times, Dec. 2020
Goodbye to a Symbol That Told Black Americans to ‘Know Your Place’
New York Time, July 2020
An ongoing initiative that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery.
NYT Magazine, Aug. 2019
The Racial Bias Built
Into Photography
The New York Times, April 2019
For Black travelers, Seattle’s
‘Green Book’ offered more than
just places to dine and sleep
The Seattle Times, Feb. 2019
The History of Racism in America:
158 Resources
Smithsonian Museum
Bob Moses, Crusader for
Civil Rights and Math
Education, Dies at 86
The New York Times, July 2021
Before Zaila Avant-garde, these
Black spellers made headlines
The 19th, July 2021
The War on History Is a War
on Democracy
The New York Times, June 2021
Watch
Fences
2 hours, 18 min.
Harriet
2 hours, 5 min.
How America Invented Race
9 min.
King in the Wilderness
1 hour, 51 min.
Loving
2 hours, 3 min.
Mudbound
2 hours, 14 min.
Race — The Power
of an Illusion
Three 1 hour episodes
Stone Ghosts In The South: Confederate Monuments And America's Battle With Itself
27 min.
Traveling While Black
A series of short interviews
from the Washington Post
Twelve Years a Slave
2 hours 14 min.
Crash Course Black
American History
Series of short videos
hosted by Clint Smith
Titus Kaphar: Can
Art Amend History?
TED Talk, 13 min.
Tulsa: The Fire and
the Forgotten
1 hour 25 min.
Listen
Anti-Racism Daily
Each week, we’ll unpack the most critical current events preventing all of us from being well – and outline tangible ways you can take action in your relationships, neighborhood, workplace, and community.
Black History for
White People
#BHforWP is a multiethnic collective dedicated to loving black and brown people by educating, resourcing, and challenging white people to actively participate in racial justice.
Black History Year
Black History Year connects you to
the history, thinkers, and activists
that are left out of the mainstream conversations.
Divided by Design
Features discussions with advocates, historians, & experts about how race intersects with health, wealth, criminal justice, housing, & voting rights
Fresh Air
The Remarkable Life of
Frederick Douglass (46 min.)
Reconstruction
The failure of Reconstruction helps explain why race, “states’ rights,” and the legacy of the Confederacy remain central themes in our
politics today. (8 episodes)
Seeing White
Fourteen-part documentary
series, released between
February & August 2017
Who We Are: A Chronicle
of Racism in America
An examination of the white supremacist foundation on which
the nation’s legal, political and social systems were built.
Additional Resources
African American
Intellectual
History Society
Anti-Racism Daily
Email a day pairing current events with historical context & personal reflections
The Atlantic
163 years of The Atlantic’s writing on race and
racism in America
The Black
Heritage Society of
Washington State
Black Past
6,000 page reference center
Black Quotidian
Everyday history in
African-American newspapers
Equal Justice
Initiative
Facing History
and Ourselves
National Museum
of African American History and Culture
Push Black
Race — The Power
of an Illusion
Online companion to documentary series
Schomburg Center
for Research in
Black Culture
Seattle Civil Rights &
Labor History Project
Slavery and
Remembrance
Smithsonian
Magazine
158 resources about
racism in America.
Zinn
Education Project