In the following account John C. Hughes, chief oral historian for the Washington State Legacy Project, discusses the life and legacy of Lillian Walker, who has been a civil rights activist in Bremerton, Washington, since World War II. Established in 2008 by Washington Secretary of State Sam Reed, The Legacy Project conducts oral histories and writes biographies of citizens “who have made extraordinary contributions to the political life of Washington State.”

<i><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman'">On August 22, 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act which ushered in the most sweeping changes in the welfare system since its adoption as part of the Social Security Act of 1935.  In the following account, former White House staffer and now University of Washington Assistant Professor of History Margaret O'Mara describes from an insider's vantage point the road to that legislation. </span></i>

<i>In 2000 Kathleen Brose led an organization called Parents Involved in Community Schools which filed a lawsuit against the Seattle School District, challenging its &quot;tie-breaker&quot; rule in Seattle Public Schools which gave preference to racial minorities in school assignments when all else was equal.  The lawsuit eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court which in June 2007 ruled in favor of Parents Involved.  In the following article Brose describes the origins of the lawsuit and her attitude toward the half century struggle to integrate Seattle's schools in light of that ruling. A link to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling appears at the end of this article. </i>

In the article below Professor Robert V. Ward, Jr., Dean of the Southern New England School of Law, describes the little known but remarkable career of William Henry &quot;Squire&quot; Johnson who was the first African American made eligible to practice law in the United States.

From April to July 1994 Rwanda suffered through a period of government-sanctioned mass murder which resulted in the deaths of nearly one million Tutsi men, women and children. Most observers point to myriad factors which caused the slaughter including government corruption, longstanding ethnic antagonism, the legacy of colonialism, and competition for scarce farmland. Jean-Damascène Gasanabo, a citizen of Rwanda whose parents and four siblings were killed during the Genocide, offers another explanation, greed and jealousy. His account of the Rwandan Genocide, written expressly for BlackPast.org, appears below.

In the following article Dr. Carol Lynn McKibben, Director of the Seaside History Project, City of Seaside, California, and Lecturer, Department of History, Stanford University, describes the subject of her research, Seaside, California, and specifically the unusual history of the African American community in this coastal city.

In the following account author, historian, and genealogist John F. Baker, Jr. describes the multi-year search for his enslaved ancestors which resulted in his 2009 book, The Washingtons of Wessyngton Plantation: Stories of My Family's Journey to Freedom.

Mildred Loving always insisted she was no civil rights pioneer, but Loving. v. Virginia, the 1967 Supreme Court case that bears her name, established the legal right to interracial marriage across the United States.  In memory of Mildred Loving, who died on May 2, 2008, University of Oregon historian Peggy Pascoe, author of the new book, <u>What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America discusses the many meanings of Loving v. Virginia.

In the following account Australian author Deirdre O'Connell explores the ironic life of Blind Tom Wiggins, the slave and later former slave musician who became one of the most prominent 19th Century African American performers.  Wiggins was the subject of her recently published biography, The Ballad of Blind Tom, Slave Pianist.

In the following account the authors Anthony D. Hill, associate professor of drama at The Ohio State University, and Douglas Q. Barnett, director, producer, and founder of Black Arts/West in Seattle, discuss why they created the Historical Dictionary on African American Theatre, the first comprehensive compendium of two centuries of blacks on stage.