Aretha and Elvis are both one-name icons. They call him the King of Rock and Roll because Beale Street infused his White body. They called Aretha the Queen of Soul because her voice refused a choice between the secular and the sacred. She was exacting, precise, disciplined in her song, and also knew how to shout heartache, grief, and exultation,

During the pandemic some New Orleanians were arrested for having a second line, a ritual moving jazz band with accompanying dancers that is commonly used to celebrate the departed. I felt softer towards them than the Mardi Gras revelers who were visiting from all over the country despite COVID, who had decided their voyeuristic pleasure was more

when the United States one-upped the Soviet Union in the moon landing, from farther south, on Florida’s Space Coast, it wasn’t a victory in everyone’s eyes. The event was protested by an Alabaman civil rights leader. Ralph Abernathy arrived outside the gates of the Kennedy Space Center with five hundred people a few days before the launch. They

Coal companies built towns for workers and their families. Theirs was an isolated and organized life. Miners were poor folks who usually stayed poor no matter how hard they worked. The company store kept the books, placing them in crippling debt even though they were the ones whose labor made others rich and gave light and heat to the country.

In terms of crops, Florida was once best known for its oranges. When Andrew Jackson took control of Florida in 1821, he established two counties: Escambia and St. Johns, with the Suwannee River as the dividing line. In 1845, when Florida became a state, Central Florida was organized under the name Orange County for its abundance. But now Florida’s

For Black Southerners, preservation has been challenging, even at an institutional level. Take, for example, the bounty that historically Black colleges and universities possess: papers, photos, all manner of artifacts. The wealth gap is evident. Lacking the capital of their White counterparts, Black institutions, even with the most careful of

“I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but by blood”—his last words before execution were recorded, and, as has often been noted, they were prophetic. But they were also only partly true. Certain crimes were ceased by the Civil War, but they have not been purged. Not yet. Harpers Ferry is

As with many HBCUs, Storer was once a high school in addition to a college. The first president of postcolonial Nigeria, Nnamdi Azikiwe, completed his high school education at Storer before going on to Howard University.

Square by square, I walked to a church. I’d been there twice before. But the details keep it from ever getting old. Outside there is a monument that was erected to the “Chasseurs-Volontaires de Saint-Domingue” of the Battle of Savannah during the American Revolutionary War. Eight hundred men from what is now Haiti alongside three thousand Frenchmen