My new book, Princess of the Hither Isles , traces the life of my paternal grandmother, Adella Hunt Logan, who’s intrigued me for as long as I can remember. During my childhood, she felt like a major presence in my life. Not only was I named for her, but a compelling 1918 oil portrait of her, by the African American painter William Edouard Scott, hung in the home of an aunt, then that of my parents, then (and still) my own. I later learned that Adella had been born into a rare southern free family of color during the Civil War and died several decades before I was born. I knew...

"I come as a friend to offer my help to this very interesting republic," wrote the nineteen-year-old Marquis de Lafayette from aboard the Victoire as it sailed from France across the ocean to the rebellious British colonies in the spring of 1777. "The happiness of America is intimately tied to the happiness of all humanity; America will become the respected and secure haven of virtue, honesty, tolerance, equality, and a peaceful freedom." [1] Within six months, he would be honored with the command of a division in the Continental Army. At the Battle of Monmouth in June 1778,...

For most of New England’s history, African Americans have been present. Their history here begins as far back as at least 1629, when enslaved Africans were brought to Massachusetts, African Americans subsequently making significant contributions at all levels of society from colonial times down to the present. Their early history, however, was often denied or forgotten altogether by White scholars who were anxious to keep the issues of slavery and racism under wraps, either uncomfortable or unwilling to acknowledge that it was part of the region’s heritage. But now, that...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...