There was also a community of Black Miamians in Liberty City, and one in Coconut Grove, though there, in the early twentieth century, Bahamian culture predominated. In the late 1920s, Zora Neale Hurston visited Miami and was delighted to witness a Bahamian dance. This prompted her to travel to the Bahamas,…

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Denmark Vesey, one of the South Carolina’s most significant enslaved insurrectionists, was once a member of Mother Emanuel. It had been founded in 1816. City leaders forced them to close their doors in 1818. Too much freedom happened there. And after Vesey’s revolt, the building was burned to the ground in 1822, only to be rebuilt. The parishioners

Eatonville was the first incorporated Black town in the United States. It was established in 1887 by freedpeople who, through collective purchases, established and advertised their town as a place of possibility for African Americans. They built wood-frame houses, schools, and a municipal government. It provided a refuge from the violence just

NAPO was a coming together of different communities in the New Afrikan Independence Movement. The Republic of New Afrika was imagined in 1968 as an independent Black-majority nation in the Southeastern United States. The first vision was articulated at a meeting of the Malcolm X Society in Detroit. The states they imagined as being part of this new

The Bahamas took a distinctly different course in relationship to the history of money-making than much of the region. African Americans who fought for the British in the Revolutionary War settled there to be free. Many of them came from the Low Country. In 1818, Great Britain declared that all enslaved Africans who set foot in the Bahamas would be

THOMAS JEFFERSON HOSTED JAMES MADISON and Alexander Hamilton one evening in 1790. The dinner was an occasion for dealmaking. In exchange for siting the nation’s capital along the Potomac River, the Southern states would pay the Revolutionary War debts of the Northeast colonies. The Residence Act was approved by the Senate and House in July.

DC is being gentrified like major cities everywhere. It raises the question: To whom does this place belong? That is a local question, but it is also an existential one. We are literally still fighting over whether Black people belong to their home places and whether their home places belong to them. Once, the formerly enslaved migrated to DC with

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.

In those years, the Company of the Indies, a French corporation that managed the empire’s colonies, controlled the slave trade in the Gulf South. Over six thousand Africans, after enduring the Middle Passage, arrived in Mobile, Biloxi, and New Orleans. After Spain took control of Louisiana, in 1762, another four thousand odd Africans arrived. They