Clarence Taylor is Professor Emeritus of Modern African American History, Religion, and Civil Rights at Baruch College, The City University of New York. His books include The Black Churches of Brooklyn (1994), Knocking at Our Own Door: Milton A. Galamison and the Struggle to Integrate New York City Schools (1997), Black Religious Intellectuals: The Fight for Equality from Jim Crow to the 21st Century (2002), and Reds at the Blackboard: Communism, Civil Rights, and the New York City Teachers Union (2011). He is co-editor, with Jonathan Birnbaum, of the prizewinning collection Civil Rights Since…

Sharon Harley is Associate Professor and former Chair of the African American Studies Department at the University of Maryland, College Park. She and historian Rosalyn Terborg-Penn co-edited the pioneer anthology The Afro-American Woman: Struggles and Images (1978), to which they contributed essays about Black women suffragists. Harley recently published “African American Women and the Right to Vote” in Women and Suffrage (2018) and “‘I Don’t Pay Those Borders No Mind At All’: Audley E. Moore (‘Queen Mother’ Moore)—Grassroots Global Traveler and Activist” in Women and Migration: Responses in…

African American women made meaningful gains in the labor force and US armed forces as a result of the wartime labor shortage during the Second World War, but these advances were sharply circumscribed by racial segregation, which was legal in all parts of the country, and virulent racism in the dominant culture. President Franklin Roosevelt’s signing of Executive Order 8802 in 1941 banned race discrimination in defense industries and civil service jobs. It was rarely enforced, however, and mostly ignored by employers until they were forced to hire nonwhites by exhaustion of the white labor…

From the first shots of the American Revolutionary War until the ultimate victory at Yorktown, black men significantly contributed to securing independence for the United States from Great Britain. On March 5, 1770, Crispus Attucks, an escaped slave, was at the center of what became known as the Boston Massacre that fanned the flames of revolution. Once the rebellion began, Prince Estabrook, another African American, was one of the first to fall on Lexington Green in Massachusetts on April 19, 1775. Other black men fought to defend nearby Concord Bridge later in the day. At least a dozen black…

African American life in the United States has been framed by migrations, forced and free. A forced migration from Africa—the transatlantic slave trade—carried black people to the Americas. A second forced migration—the internal slave trade—transported them from the Atlantic coast to the interior of the American South. A third migration—this time initiated largely, but not always, by black Americans—carried black people from the rural South to the urban North. At the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, African American life is again being transformed by another…

2015 was a big year for Alexander Hamilton. Nearly two hundred eleven years after the nation’s first treasury secretary was shot and killed in a duel with then-Vice President of the United States Aaron Burr, an Off Broadway play opened at the Public Theater in New York City’s East Village to rave reviews and sold-out houses. The brainchild of Tony Award–winning playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda, Hamilton had an extended run and remained the toughest ticket to score in town. By the summer, the hip-hop–infused musical was bound for a bigger home on Broadway, having created a boom of interest in all…

When George Washington, newly elected president, picked the members of his administration in 1789 he tapped thirty-two-year-old Alexander Hamilton to be the first treasury secretary. Hamilton had been a colonel on Washington’s staff during the Revolution, and had served with him at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Hamilton also had special qualifications for the job: as a teenager on the island of St. Croix he had clerked for Beekman and Cruger, a New York–based merchant house with international business; as a lawyer he had helped charter one of the country’s first banks, the Bank of New…

Alice Stokes Paul (1885−1977) was one of the leading feminists of the early twentieth century, a person who brought the women’s suffrage movement into the national spotlight. Passage of the Susan B. Anthony Amendment or the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution was due in large part to Paul’s visionary leadership, courage, determination, brilliant organizational skills, and laser-like focus on planning and execution. A tireless, unrelenting, uncompromising, and uncomplaining feminist fighter, she fervently believed that there could be no gender equality until and unless the nation was…

Abraham Lincoln was not an original advocate of abolition. In fact we know that his journey to what he called "the central act of my administration, and the great event of the nineteenth century" was a relatively slow, though continuous, one. Emancipation was a complex process that involved the actions of the slaves, the Union Army, Congress, and the President. Historians have argued over the relative roles of the slaves and Lincoln in the coming of emancipation. It is my purpose to shift the terms of this debate by drawing attention to a third group of emancipators—abolitionists, particularly…

Thorpe’s deception and subsequent confession deals amateur sport in America the hardest blow it has ever had to take and disarranges the scheme of amateur athletics the world over. New York Times, January 28, 1913 The early years of the twentieth century were a dynamic, often chaotic time for the emerging phenomenon of sports in America. With the exception of baseball, which had its modern form in place by 1900, rules and organizations were formed and reformed year by year. Basketball was brand new, invented in 1891. Football was strictly a collegiate game dominated by the northeastern Big…