The university learned last year that the property had previously been used as a burial ground. In response, the institution issued two sequences of field testing, which has recently conclusively confirmed the presence of graves.
A recently graduated master’s degree student and archivist at the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock has recently launched a website that highlights the contributions that Black communities in Arkansas made to the World War I effort.
On March 5, the Associate Student Body Senate at the University of Mississippi voted unanimously on a resolution asking university administrators to move a Confederate soldier monument from its prominent spot on campus to a Confederate cemetery.
The exhibit features curated photos and documents that show how the college reacted after being forced to admit African-American student Harry T. Pratt in 1891. After Pratt was admitted, the college established a policy to only admit “reputable White people.”
The $27.20 per semester fee, which would be added to students’ tuition, would contribute to a fund to benefit the descendant community of the 272 enslaved individuals who were sold to pay off Georgetown’s debt in 1838.
The insights the ads provide on the experiences of enslaved Africans and African-Americans are especially valuable because so little information about these individuals has been preserved.
Jennings was the personal “manservant” for James Madison on his estate in Virginia and also in Washington, D.C. After Madison’s death, Jennings secured his freedom and worked in the U.S. Pension Office.
Professor Brady was the first African American to earned a Ph.D. in chemistry. He will be honored with plaques at the University of Illinois, where he earned his doctorate, and at schools where he served on the faculty: Fisk University, Tuskegee University, Howard University, and Tougaloo College.
“The Yoke of Bondage: Christianity and African Slavery in the United States” features documents, including rare books, that range from 1619, when the first slaves where brought to Virginia, to the Civil War’s end in 1865.
Slaves, rented from local property owners, were used to construct many of the earliest campus buildings. Once the university opened, slaves were used for manual labor on campus. Some faculty members owned slaves.
In 1847, 172 years ago, Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany started The North Star as the leading abolitionist newspaper of the day. Now, with the blessing and permission of the family of Frederick Douglass, The North Star is being revived.
When McMicken died in 1858, he left money and property to the city of Cincinnati “to found an institution where White boys and girls might be taught.” He owned slaves and reportedly fathered children with enslaved women.
A new bill passed into law in the state of Illinois requires all state-operated colleges and universities in the state to include at least one course on Black history. The educational institutions can meet the requirement by offering an online course.
Researchers at the University of Chicago and the University of Southern California recently discovered a silent movie that was filmed in 1898. The film, entitled Something Good-Negro Kiss, is believed to be earliest depiction of African American affection captured on film.
Students at Virginia Commonwealth University spent the fall semester studying the enslaved population at Wilton House, the main building at a former, 2,000-acre tobacco plantation.
Michele Valerie Ronnick, now a full professor in the department of classical and modern languages and literatures at Wayne State University in Detroit, has been a leader in the effort to highlight the pioneering work of early Black classicists.
The investigation, led by three Black and three White faculty members at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, found no evidence that the school had a connection to the slave trade. However, the founders of the seminary collectively owned more than 50 slaves.
In 1957, Levern Hamlin Allen was the first African-American student to enroll at what is now Western Carolina University and was among the first Black students to be admitted to any of North Carolina’s predominantly White state institutions of higher education.
The Center for Arkansas History and Culture at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock has completed work on a project to digitize 350,000 items relating to the history of segregation and integration of Arkansas’s educational system.
Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation Campus Centers are a nationwide effort developed by the Association of American Colleges and Universities and funded by Newman’s Own Foundation and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. The latest center has opened on the Newark campus of Rutgers University in New Jersey.
Lucile Bluford was denied admission into the journalism graduate program 11 times on the account of the color of her skin. George C. Brooks was director of financial aid at the university for 17 years and participated in efforts to desegregate local restaurants.
Upon his death, John Robinson left his estate, farm, and 73 slaves to what is now Washington and Lee University. In 1836, the college sold the slaves and used the money to build Robinson Hall. Now the university is removing Robinson’s name from the building which will now honor the school’s first Black student.
In the 1830s, Pennington, an escapee from slavery in Maryland and an aspiring minister, audited classes at the Yale Divinity School even though he was not allowed to officially enroll. He was permitted to sit in the back of the classroom and listen. He was not allowed to speak during classes or borrow books from the library.
Tupac Shakur was a prominent voice of 1990s hip-hop and remains one of the most influential artists of his generation, having sold more than 42 million copies of his albums and singles. Temple University in Philadelphia has acquired a dozen documents handwritten by Shakur and two pieces of jewelry.
According to its website, the new lab will “examine the life and afterlives of slavery and emancipation, linking Duke University to the Global South.”
The mission of the new institute is to honor and study the United States civil rights movement and to promote civil rights and social change. It will host speakers and events, curate museum exhibits, develop an interactive website and publications, and support education and research.
Tera W. Hunter, the Edwards Professor of History and professor of African American studies at Princeton University in New Jersey, has been awarded the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize in women’s history and/or feminist theory as well as the Littleton-Griswold Prize in U.S. law and society from the American Historical Association.
Freedom colonies were self-sufficient, all-Black settlements that former slaves established after they were freed. The Texas Freedom Colonies Project, established by a scholar at Texas A&M University, aims to help African-American Texans reclaim their unrecognized and unrecorded heritage.
The Bishop Joseph Johnson Black Cultural Center at Vanderbilt University has unveiled 10 new portraits of individuals of all races from Vanderbilt’s present and past who have made the university a more inclusive space for Black students, faculty, and staff.
The University of Virginia and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh will collaborate with The HistoryMakers, to enhance the nation’s largest archive of videotaped oral histories of African-American leaders.
A new interdisciplinary building on Johns Hopkins University’s East Baltimore campus will be named in honor of Henrietta Lacks, who was the source of the HeLa cell line that has been critical to numerous significant advances in modern medicine.
The Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles has allocated $5 million to establish the African American Art History Initiative.
In 1978, photographer Phillip Marin Denman began documenting the more than 100 buildings on the grounds of the Laurel Valley Plantation in Thibodaux, Louisiana. He returned in 2005 and again in 2017 to record the condition of the plantation and the remaining structures.
While investigating the 1919 Elaine Massacre, University of Arkansas Little Rock history professor Brian Mitchell discovered that Leroy Johnston, a Black World War I veteran and victim of the massacre, had his medical records altered, denying him military honors that he deserved.
The original wood engraving of a slave ship was created in 1788 by British abolitionists who intended to influence the legislators who regulated the slave trade. It was the first image to expose ordinary people to the barbarism of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Brian Purnell, an associate professor of history and Africana studies at Bowdoin College in Maine, believes that even though Maine’s statehood nearly 200 years ago kept the balance between slave-states and free-states, it strengthened slavery elsewhere.
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