slavery

July 1, 2016 - As the U.S. celebrates its 240th Independence Day, Frederick Douglass' 1852 speech "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July" serves as a reminder that there are still those who are excluded from the American dream.

November 3, 2015 - News stories that ask what went wrong with the South too often fail to capture the context of its intergenerational poverty: centuries of enslavement and systemic discrimination that resulted in the immense racial disparities we see today. And it's not just a Southern problem — it's an American one.

August 19, 2015 - Cities that resist federal immigration enforcement policies are being compared to very different chapters of the South's tortured racial history.

June 22, 2015 - Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof embraced the flags of white-supremacist regimes that did not exist in his lifetime. This is no ordinary racial bias: Someone had to teach him these elaborated historical traditions.

April 1, 2015 - Last week, writer Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic and several scholars gathered at Duke University to discuss reparations and the moral debt the U.S. owes to African Americans for centuries of oppression. While resistance to reparations is great, the panelists discussed why a serious consideration of them could transform the country.

December 2, 2014 - Edward Baptist's rigorously researched book interweaves economic analysis of the slave trade and the production that came from it with heartbreaking stories of the lives and suffering of the people who were enslaved.

July 3, 2014 - Political psychologists distinguish between "blind patriotism" that's intolerant and unquestioning and "constructive patriotism," which welcomes questioning with the hope of creating positive change. On this most patriotic of holidays, we share some of our favorite writings and songs in the spirit of the latter, and we invite you to do the same.

June 19, 2014 - Today marks the holiday that commemorates the day in 1865 that slaves in Texas were finally set free. We celebrate with a song to honor the occasion by jazz great Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five, "Juneteenth Jamboree."

March 25, 2014 - The film about the experience of a free black man kidnapped and sold into slavery in Louisiana downplayed revolt -- despite its prominent place in Solomon Northup's autobiography.

March 13, 2014 - This week Glenn Ford, a black man wrongfully convicted of murder by an all-white jury in Louisiana, was freed after spending 30 years on death row at the state's notorious Angola penitentiary. What did he endure in a place where a federal judge has ruled conditions amount to "cruel and unusual punishment"?