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 the article below Seattle historian Carver Clark Gayton describes his most prominent ancestor, Lewis G. Clarke, who is widely considered to be the model for one of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s main characters in her novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Here Gayton describes Clarke’s evolving relationship … Read MoreLewis G. Clarke: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Forgotten Hero
In the article below Clarence Spigner, DrPH., Professor of Health Services in the School of Public Health, University of Washington, Seattle, briefly describes the saga of Henrietta Lacks whose cells have been used without her family’s permission for over sixty years of bio-medical research. Dr. … Read MoreHenrietta Lacks and the Debate Over the Ethics of Bio-Medical Research
Pioneering African-American Aviators Featuring the Tuskegee Airmen of Arkansas is a study of little known black women and men who participated in the first four decades of U.S. aviation history. The book began originally in 2006 as a biography of Milton Pitts Crenchaw, a native … Read MoreArkansas Pioneers in Flight: African Americans in Aviation from the Natural State, 1932 to 1953.
In the article below, Fort Worth historian Richard Selcer introduces us to the African American community which has been a presence in this city since its founding in 1849. Fort Worth, Texas’s black community has a distinctive if not unique history. Fort Worth was a … Read MoreFort Worth, Texas, Where the West and the South Meet: A Brief History of the City’s African American Community, 1849-2012
Few people connect Washington Territory with slavery. However one incident in 1860 was a reminder that the peculiar institution reached the pre-Civil War Pacific Northwest. In the account below, historian Lorraine McConaghy describes the saga of Charles Mitchell whose attempted escape from slavery in a … Read MoreCharles Mitchell, Slavery, and Washington Territory in 1860
Alan Gilbert, University of Denver political scientist and anti-racist activist, is the author of Black Patriots and Loyalists: Fighting for Emancipation in the War for Independence, one of the few works that examines the free and enslaved blacks who joined the American Patriots and the … Read MoreFighting for Freedom on Both Sides of the American Revolution
In the account below, attorney and historian James H. Johnston describes six generations of descendants of Yarrow Mamout, a Muslim slave made famous by Charles Willson Peale’s 1819 painting of him in Georgetown in the District of Columbia. Johnston’s discussion of the evolution of his … Read MoreAn American Family’s Multigenerational Rise from Slavery to Harvard University
In the article below historian Robin Dearmon Muhammad discusses the growth of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) or the Garvey Movement in the American West, with particular emphasis on its influence in black working-class organizing in the San Francisco Bay Area after World War … Read MoreGarveyism Looks Toward the Pacific: The UNIA and Black Workers in the American West
In the article below Jill L. Newmark, exhibition specialist in the History of Medicine Division of the National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, describes thefirst hospital sponsored by the United States government specifically to meet the health care needs … Read MoreContraband Hospital, 1862-1863: Health Care For the First Freedpeople
William Loren Katz has devoted his life to researching and writing African American history. In the following account written to describe the reissue of one of his most successful books, Black Indians, he describes how he became an historian of African America and particularly the … Read MoreBlack Indians: A Personal and Historic Journey
