Perspectives on African American History features accounts and descriptions of important but little known events in African American history recalled often by those who were witnesses or participants or viewpoints about historical developments shaping the contemporary black world. Many of these accounts will be instant primary sources available to current visitors to BlackPast and to future historians. Each article is accompanied by a brief biography and photo of its author.
In her new book, Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America, historian Beryl Satter puts a human face on the often told story of racial discrimination in urban housing by following the career of her father, Chicago attorney Mark J. … Read MoreRace, Family, and Real Estate: Beryl Satter’s Family Properties
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 … Read MoreFighting for Racial Justice in the Pacific Northwest: Lillian Walker and the Long Struggle for Civil Rights
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 … Read MoreWelfare As We Knew It: The 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act
In 2000 Kathleen Brose led an organization called Parents Involved in Community Schools which filed a lawsuit against the Seattle School District, challenging its “tie-breaker” rule in Seattle Public Schools which gave preference to racial minorities in school assignments when all else was equal. The … Read MoreThe Tie Breaker Ruling in Perspective: A Plaintiff Looks Back on the Historic U.S. Supreme Court Decision of 2007
Since J. Clay Smith’s publication of Emancipation: The Making of the Black Lawyer, it has been taken as gospel that Boston resident Macon Allen in 1844 became was the first African-American admitted to the bar to practice law in the United States. Recently, as part … Read MoreFrom the Slave Quarters to the Courtroom: The Story of the First African American Attorney in the United States
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 … Read MoreRace and Color in A California Coastal Community: The Seaside Story
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. Image Courtesy of John Baker When I … Read MoreThe Washingtons of Wessyngton Plantation: One Tennessee Community’s Odyssey from Slavery to Freedom
“I am astounded. I cannot account for it, no one can. No one understands it,” a St Louis man uttered after watching Blind Tom perform in concert in 1866. His mystification was by no means isolated. Few other performers on the nineteenth century stage aroused … Read MoreConfounded: The Enigma of “Blind Tom” Wiggins
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 of African American Theater, the first comprehensive … Read MoreThe Black Presence in Theater through the Centuries in the Historical Dictionary of African American Theater
Beginning with the Exclusion Law of 1844 enacted by the provisional government of the region, Oregon passed a series of measures designed to ban African American settlement in the territory. Historian Elizabeth McLagan describes those laws in the article below. Oregon passed exclusion laws against … Read MoreThe Black Laws of Oregon, 1844-1857
