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
Many historians and legal scholars consider the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education to be one of the most important and far reaching pronouncements in the history of the Court. On December 8, 1953 Thurgood Marshall, the chief legal counsel … Read More(1953) Thurgood Marshall, “Argument Before the U.S. Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education”
Founding publisher of the Los Angeles-based African American newspaper, the Sentinel, Leon H. Washington Jr. was born in Kansas City, Kansas on April 15, 1907. Washington, along with his two other siblings, was born to his parents, Leon and Blanche Washington. Young Washington spent much … Read MoreLeon H. Washington, Jr. (1907-1974)
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”
The 10th Cavalry was one of the original six regiments of the regular army set aside for black enlisted men. These were authorized by Congress in the act of July 28, 1866 reorganizing the army for post-Civil War service, mainly against native peoples in the … Read More10th Cavalry Regiment (1866-1944)
As Harper’s Ferry would prove, John Brown’s preferred method of battling slavery was to free hundreds of enslaved people at a time in a single attack. However, the week of Christmas 1858, he made an exception and successfully rescued eleven Missouri slaves, throwing the region … Read MoreJohn Brown’s Christmas Raid into Missouri 1858
The First Kansas Colored Infantry Regiment was established through the efforts of James H. Lane, the U.S. Senator from Kansas from 1861 to 1866. As Kansas joined the Union on the eve of the Civil War in 1861, Lane recruited African-Americans to fight against the … Read MoreFirst Kansas Colored Infantry (1862-1865)
In the following article University of Tulsa historian Kristen T. Oertel describes the people who like John Brown helped enslaved African Americans in Missouri escape to freedom in Kansas Territory through the western Underground Railroad. African Americans have valorized John Brown throughout history, linking a … Read More“Blazing a Path to Freedom: African Americans and Their White Allies in Bleeding Kansas”
In 2010, retired lieutenant colonel Allen West became the first black Republican to represent Florida in Congress since Rep. Josiah T. Walls, who served during Reconstruction. Congressman West was born on February 7, 1961 in Atlanta, Georgia to Herman and Elizabeth West. His father was … Read MoreAllen West (1961- )
