Sublime

creator of the Smithsonian Museum’s “Programs in Black Culture,” and one of the leading authorities on Black American music culture,

Moses built one pool in Harlem, in Colonial Park, at 146th Street, and he was determined that that was going to be the only pool that Negroes—or Puerto Ricans, whom he classed with Negroes as “colored people”—were going to use. He didn’t want them “mixing” with white people in other pools, in part because he was afraid, probably with cause, that “t

Three white men approached Lamar Smith, who during World War II had enlisted in the Army at the age of forty-nine, and who now, having returned from the war to build up a profitable farm, had enlisted in another battle: “He was determined,” an admirer would say, “that his people would have a say in local government.” The three men warned Smith to s

It was at Harpers Ferry that the abolitionist John Brown decided to liberate America’s slaves and set up a new nation of his own in northwestern Virginia, which was a pretty ambitious undertaking considering that he had an army of just twenty-one people. To that end, on October 16, 1859, he and his little group stole into town under cover of darkne

It was left, then, to cast Sharpton, and for Sharpton to cast himself, as the Outrageous Nigger, the familiar role—assigned sixty years ago to Father Divine and thirty years later to Adam Clayton Powell—of the essentially manageable fraud whose first concern is his own well-being.

October 2, 2006, Charles Carl Roberts IV walked into an Amish schoolhouse carrying a weapon.

The deputy had his gun out now. “First thing I thought when they said to keep an eye out for a Plymouth,” he said. “Only a nigger’d steal that.”

while supposedly holding up his hands in surrender. The reportedly unjustified nature of the shooting sparks violent riots, stokes the Black Lives Matter movement, and creates a new protest gesture known as “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot.” It’s followed by a rash of black men ambushing and murdering police officers around the nation. But in 2015, the U.S.