Memphis, like Chicago, was a Great Migration destination for African Americans from Mississippi. One train line took folks from Mississippi to Memphis or Chicago. Another took folks from Alabama to Detroit.

Princeton University’s first graduate student, future president James Madison, brought one slave with him to campus and another to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. The latter he had to free: all that talk of liberty had ruined him, a poison to the rest of the plantation. He took the former home with him.

Being so close, yet outside the purview of American law, has been a source of Bahamian prosperity in one way or another for generations, particularly for those seeking to protect profit from taxation. The Bahamas are well-known as a tax shelter. The bulk of banking on the islands is offshore, meaning that the accounts are held by noncitizens and no

Critical theorist Walter Benjamin once distinguished between two types of storytellers: one is a keeper of the traditions; another is the one who has journeyed afar and tells stories of other places. But there is a third, and that is the exile. The exile, with a gaze that is obscured by distance and time, may not always be precise in terms of infor

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

Liberty City, Miami, exploded in the spring of 1980,

The cornerstone was laid for the White House in October of 1792, and building continued over three decades, a labor extended in part due to the British army setting it ablaze in 1814. It was designed by architect James Hoban, and much of the physical labor for building the edifice was done by the enslaved, along with some free labor. Its halls were

Shame, horror, and humor are cast upon Appalachia. It is the Whitest region of the South and among the poorest, plagued by failed American dreams. Whether or not people use the distasteful pejorative “trash,” they often imply and apply it to the people here.

In Atlanta, 40 percent of Black households have incomes of less than $50,000, whereas only 20 percent of White households do. Look at corporate boards and corporate leadership and you will see that they remain overwhelmingly White in the city: 80 percent of White Atlantans have a college degree; 27 percent of those who are Black do. And it is a cit