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.
Image Ownership: Public Domain In the essay below, Associate Professor Trysh Travis of the University of Florida’s Center for Women’s Studies and Gender Research Center explores some of the controversy surrounding Kathryn Stockett’s novel The Help, which has also become a major film of the … Read MoreIs The Help Realistic? It Depends.
In the account below Edith Lee-Payne recalls the day she was photographed as a 12 year old participant in the March on Washington, and the curious history of that photograph through 2011. My grandparents, Marie and John Spencer Lee, left Culpeper, Virginia for Washington, D.C. … Read MoreMarch on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August 28, 1963: One Participant Remembers
In the article below Clarence Lang, an associate professor of African and African American Studies at the University of Kansas describes his book, Grassroots at the Gateway which explores the changes in 20th Century St. Louis’s political, economic, and social landscape and how those changes … Read MoreBlack Freedom and Social Class in St. Louis, Missouri between the Great Depression and the Great Society
In the account below Central Washington University anthropologist Mark Auslander describes why he wrote The Accidental Slaveholder, which describes the curious ways in which the legacy of slavery extend into the contemporary era. I grew up in Washington D.C. in a secular Jewish family in … Read MoreRemembrance in the Cemetery: In Search of “The Accidental Slaveowner”
Many Americans are familiar with the now iconic images of James Meredith, the black student who desegregated the University of Mississippi in October 1962, surrounded by white U.S. marshals assigned to protect him and ensure that a U.S. Supreme Court desegregation order be enforced. Few … Read MoreU.S. Marshal Luke Moore at Ole Miss, 1962
Arthur Allen Fletcher is known to many as the father of affirmative action. In the following account historian David Hamilton Golland describes the career of Fletcher, a Republican civil rights activist during the last half of the 20th Century. Arthur Allen Fletcher, known to many as … Read MoreArthur Allen Fletcher, “The Father of Affirmative Action”
In the article below, Kimberley Mangun, an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at The University of Utah, describes how she “discovered” Beatrice Morrow Cannady, an editor who spent nearly 25 years advocating civil rights in Oregon. Cannady used her Portland-based newspaper, The Advocate, … Read MoreBeatrice Morrow Cannady and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Oregon, 1912-1936
Today the phrase “Uncle Tom” evokes a powerfully negative image in American society. It depicts a weak, subservient, cringing black man who betrays his race and its struggle for liberation. David Reynolds, an English professor in the Graduate School of the City University of New … Read MoreUncle Tom Revisited: Rescuing the Real Character from the Caricature
In the following article University of Oregon historian Daniel Pope briefly outlines the history of African Americans in the Advertising Industry since the beginning of the 20th Century. Paul Kinsey, a young white copywriter at a prominent advertising agency in 1961 dates an African American … Read More“Mad Men” in Black: African Americans in the Twentieth Century U.S. Advertising Industry
