Library
55,246 resources — aggregated, dated, and cited for further study.
75 resources
Scholarship on the 1619 Point Comfort landing and its contested history.
A landmark essay connecting slavery, redlining, and the wealth gap.
How plantation accounting shaped modern American capitalism.
Firsthand Negro Leagues memory around Paige's 1965 MLB return.
A newly authenticated Underground Railroad safe-house passage in Manhattan.
Survivor-descendant testimony to memorialize Tulsa's Greenwood.
Tulsa wasn't unique — other thriving Black business districts and what befell them.
The post-emancipation laws that criminalized Black freedom and forced cheap labor.
Black women founders received about 0.34% of total US venture capital.
The Supreme Court case that legalized compulsory sterilization of the "unfit."
A live reparations fight: an ultimatum to Lowcountry plantations to return ancestral land.
Daniel Sayers''s archaeology of the maroon communities who lived free in the Great Dismal Swamp.
Self-sufficient maroon communities hid in the Great Dismal Swamp for ten generations.
An heirs'-property land grab and Gullah Geechee displacement on Hilton Head.
The "e-carceration" economy that extracts money from poor, disproportionately Black defendants.
Data: the typical white family''s net worth is roughly ten times that of a Black family.
Hamer''s nonconsensual hysterectomy and the routine sterilization of Black Southern women.
How a small free-Black community lived, worked, and owned land in 17th-century Virginia.
How Black bodies, robbed from Cedar Grove Cemetery, were used for dissection.
The 1811 German Coast uprising — the largest U.S. slave revolt — deliberately buried.
A whole Black Florida town erased in 1923 — and nearly erased from memory.
How state-administered GI Bill benefits were systematically denied to Black veterans.
Two hundred years of armed uprisings against the myth of the compliant slave.
Overview of the Jim Crow legal regime that codified racial segregation and caste from Reconstruction into the 20th century.
The definitive Texas history reference article on Juneteenth, covering General Order No. 3 in Galveston, the holiday's evolution from political rallies to community celebrations, its spread beyond Texas, and its 1979 recognition as a Texas state holiday.
National Archives blog post tracing how freed African Americans in Texas established the first Juneteenth celebration in 1866, how the holiday survived Jim Crow suppression, and how it spread nationwide during the Great Migration.
An 18-month investigation into white-vigilante shootings of Black men after Katrina.
The 1939 concert and the DAR's refusal of Constitution Hall.
Overview of the decision and its legacy as the "Dred Scott of our era."
An award-winning undercover exposé inside a private prison.
Scholarly overview of the destruction of Greenwood.
The museum's account of 2020 and the movement that followed.
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed discusses her book On Juneteenth at a 2021 National Archives virtual event, reflecting on the holiday's significance as both a celebration and an educational day about slavery and racial discrimination.
A 170-year claim to land left to enslaved ancestors in an 1855 will.
Death-row cases where prosecutors struck Black jurors at twice the rate of whites.
The 1919 Red Summer, including the Elaine, Arkansas massacre — among the deadliest, least-taught.
The 1973 case exposing the federally funded forced sterilization of Black and poor women.
Reparations framed as a moral and biblical obligation inside Black congregations.
The founder of the Negro National League — Black enterprise under Jim Crow.
The first documented Africans — and first slave rebellion — in what is now the US.
Overview of the three 1965 marches and their role in winning the Voting Rights Act.
How sharecropping and the debt-peonage trap re-subordinated freedpeople after slavery.
1860-census breakdown of slaveholding by household — context for the "only a few owned slaves" claim.
Traces Virginia's first Africans back to Angola and the Portuguese trade.
The massacre and the Supreme Court ruling that gutted Reconstruction enforcement.
The former plantation's convict-leasing past and present-day carceral labor.
An accessible overview of Malcolm Foley's thesis connecting greed to racial violence.
How Louisiana sugar slavery connects to the modern American diet.
David Walker's 1829 Appeal terrified slaveholders more than any revolt.
The bloodiest Reconstruction massacre and the ruling that gutted civil-rights enforcement.
Drawing the line from racial-terror lynching to the modern death penalty.
Official SSA history of the carve-out that left out most Black workers.
Black divers documenting the wrecks of slave ships and tracing ancestry.
J. Marion Sims's surgeries on Anarcha, Lucy, Betsey, and other enslaved women.
Only ~30 historic Black towns survive; the activists fighting to save them.
How federal policy stripped a million Black families of millions of acres.
Heirs' property — the legal mechanism behind a staggering loss of Black-owned land.
The 1898 Wilmington coup that overthrew a biracial government.
The little-known 1919 Elaine, Arkansas massacre of sharecroppers.
Argues Africans were in the Americas long before 1619.
Parks and the Black photographers carrying his legacy forward.
Museum explainer on the internal slave trade, with a slave-ship manifest documenting people bought and sold as commodities.
How courts and cities finance themselves through fees and fines, citing Ferguson.
California's pivot from cash reparations to Black landownership and climate justice.
The 2018 discovery of 95 convict-leasing victims under a Texas school site.
Authoritative explainer of the clause that counted enslaved people as three-fifths of a person to boost their enslavers' political power.
A landmark investigation documenting the theft of Black-owned land through violence and fraud.
Modern debt-peonage work camps that disproportionately hold Black people.
Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s authoritative essay on the origins and enduring significance of Juneteenth, tracing General Order No. 3 through the Civil Rights revival to Juneteenth's spread across the United States.
Clear explainer from HISTORY on how Juneteenth marks the June 19, 1865 arrival of Union troops in Galveston, the delayed enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation in Texas, and the holiday's path to becoming a federal observance in 2021.
Arkansas's criminal-eviction law jails tenants — a modern criminalization of poverty.
Slavery's "taste for violent punishment" and the modern prison.
HBCU homecoming as cultural resilience amid threats to the institutions.
The first documented child of African descent born in the English colonies.
Plantation-turned-prisons (Angola, Parchman) and uncompensated field labor.