Black History

Colonial Sudbury, Massachusetts, was designated the Puritan Village by author Sumner Chilton Powell in his 1964 Pulitzer Prize–winning history of the founding of this quintessential New England town in 1638. Yet this quiet rural village also had a darker history that is often overlooked. Sudbury’s Puritan inhabitants, including some of the most prominent citizens in town, held and sold enslaved Black people throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Stories gleaned from preserved records highlight the lives of men, women and children held in bondage, including a court case involving an enslaved boy repeatedly beaten and left scarred by his master less than thirty years after the town’s founding, as well as the bill of sale of Phebey, age two, to a woman in another town. Local author Jane Sciacca uncovers the hidden side of suffering in this New England town.

Death on the Turnpike

Discover the bloody story of John Wesley Wable's 1950s killing spree that rocked Western Pennsylvania, and left truckers and drivers alike frightened of the turnpike. After a series of murdered truck drivers and a high-speed interstate chase, Wable's gruesome criminal story also involves a thrilling court case and unresolved mysteries to do this day.

Author Richard Gazarik details the incredible true crime narratives of the man dubbed the "Pennsylvania Turnpike Phantom Killer."

Explore accounts of Oklahoma’s Freedmen as told by their descendants in these stories of resistance and resilience on the Western frontier. The Freedmen of Oklahoma were black people, both enslaved and free, who had been living among the Indian nations. After the official abolition of slavery in 1866, they forged an identity as their own people as they faced the challenges of the western frontier. By 1906, before Oklahoma statehood, over 20,000 people were classified as “Freedmen” from Five Tribes: Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek and Seminole Nations. For decades, their descendants have been rediscovering their family history and restoring its place in the larger narrative. Angela Walton-Raji has compiled this collection of stories, told by descendants from all five tribes, to ensure that the Freedmen of Oklahoma claim their vibrant part of the state’s heritage.

Author Orice Jenkins tells the full story of Ulysses Goolsby and the Early County massacre more than 100 years later. The Early County Massacre has been known as the Grandison Goolsby War for over a century, focusing on the events of December 30th, 1915, when 46-year-old Grandison used gunfire to defend himself from a lynching mob. Lesser known is that the incident started two days earlier when Grandison’s son was attacked on his way to a wedding, and that it all led to the Supreme Court of Georgia sending that same son to death row five years later.

Fear, rumor and white supremacist ideals clashed with an unprecedented labor action spawned an epic tragedy.

On November 23, 1887, white vigilantes gunned down unarmed black laborers and their families due to strikes on Louisiana sugar cane plantations. A future member of the U.S. House of Representatives was among the leaders of a mob that routed black men from houses and forced them to a stretch of railroad track, ordering them to run for their lives before gunning them down. According to a witness, the guns firing in the black neighborhoods sounded like a battle. Author and award-winning reporter John DeSantis uses correspondence, interviews and federal records to detail this harrowing true story.

Authors Joseph Bilby and Harry Ziegler chart the brief rise of the Ku Klux Klan and how New Jersey collectively stood up to bigotry.

The state, though, was not immune to the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan in the first half of the twentieth century. Former vaudevillians Arthur H. Bell and his wife used the tactics of public theater to advertise and recruit for the organization. At a massive riot in Perth Amboy, thousands of immigrants besieged a few hundred Klansmen, tossed them out of building windows, burned their cars and ran them out of town. The allying of pro-Nazi German Bund groups and the Klan in the lead-up to World War II marked the end of the Klan's foothold. Authors Joseph Bilby and Harry Ziegler chart the brief rise of the Ku Klux Klan and how New Jersey collectively stood up to bigotry.

By the late 20th century, Montpelier, the home of James and Dolley Madison, had been altered until it would no longer have been recognizable to the couple.

In 2000 the newly-created Montpelier Foundation took over management of the historic home with the seemingly insurmountable task of restoring it to be a visual record of the Madisons' era. Within ten years, the Foundation overcame numerous hurdles, turning Montpelier into a monument to the Father of the Constitution. Over the next decade the site also became a monument to Montpelier's enslaved. The buildings in their community next to the Madisons' home were reconstructed, and award-winning exhibits dramatically illustrate the tragedy of slavery and essential role of enslaved people in Madison's life.

Foundation co-founder William H. Lewis details the nonprofit's ambitious preservation projects and remarkable achievements.

New York City is blessed with an incredible array of public sculptures.

One overlooked aspect of this collection is its monuments of Black Americans, each with its own remarkable story. The first appearance of a Black person in a city monument came in the Civil War Soldiers’ Monument in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery in 1876, but this was a nameless symbolic figure. It wasn’t until 1945 that Booker T. Washington became the first identifiable Black American honored in a New York City monument. In 2007, the city dedicated its first monument to a Black woman, Harriet Tubman. Behind every first is a story of triumph over adversity and exclusion. Local author David Felsen reveals the stories behind thirty inspiring monuments that have endured, as well as how they found their place in the city’s history.

Discover the untold stories of Virginia’s heroes in the Revolutionary War—grief, sacrifice, and courage.

The stories of the passions and personalities that placed Virginia in the forefront of the Revolutionary War were replete with grief and sacrifice. The breakup of families over political differences was common. Bereavement spared few, as evidenced by the death of George Washington’s stepson. But courageous characters persisted, from the “Paul Revere of Virginia” to the enslaved man turned American spy who helped ensure the Continental Army’s final victory at Yorktown. Author and TV host Chuck Mills documents the human side of the Revolution in the Old Dominion, including chronicles of battles, leaders and the impact of war on ordinary men and women.

Discover a remarkably intimate and compelling view of the riots with stories of individuals on both sides of the conflict that rocked Kensington.

The outskirts of Philadelphia seethed with tension in the spring of 1844. By May 6, the situation between the newly arrived Irish Catholics and members of the anti-immigrant Nativist Party took an explosively violent turn. When the Irish asked to have their children excused from reading the Protestant version of the Bible in local public schools, the nativists held a protest. The Irish pushed back. For three days, riots scorched the streets of Kensington. Though the immigrants first had the upper hand, the nativists soon put the community to the torch. Those who fled were shot. Two Catholic churches burned to the ground, along with several blocks of houses, stores, a nunnery and a Catholic school. Local historian Kenneth W. Milano traces this tumultuous history from the preceding hostilities through the bloody skirmishes and finally to the aftermath of arrests and trials.

During World War II, no American city suffered a worse housing shortage than Detroit, and no one suffered that shortage more than the city's African American citizens.

In 1941, the federal government began constructing the Sojourner Truth Housing Project in northeast Detroit to house 200 black war production workers and their families. Almost immediately, whites in the neighborhood vehemently protested. On February 28, 1942, a confrontation between black tenants and white protesters erupted in a riot that sent at least 40 to the hospital and more than 220 to jail. This confrontation was the precursor to the bloodiest race riot of the war just sixteen months later.

Gerald Van Dusen, author of 2020 Michigan Notable Books nominee Detroit's Birwood Wall, unfolds the background and events of this overlooked moment in Motor City history.

On February 5th, 1946, the Ferguson brothers were concluding a night out celebrating Charles Ferguson's reenlistment in the Army...

Charles, wearing his military uniform, walked with his brothers Alphonso, Joseph, and Richard towards the Freeport Bus Terminal to go home. A provisional Freeport police officer named Joseph Romeika stopped the brothers over a disorderly conduct complaint. Words were exchanged, and Officer Romeika killed Charles, Alphonso and shot Joseph within minutes of the initial stop. Following the unarmed shooting, Romeikia was acquitted despite changing stories of eyewitnesses.

Discover how the shooting became a catalyst for civil rights efforts and immortalized in a Woody Guthrie protest song.

Authors David Meyers and Elise Meyers Walker separate fact from fiction in the story of Ohio’s Underground Railroad. The Underground Railroad was a macabre sort of dance between good and evil in which each side was trying to steal away the other’s partner. However, in the upside-down-world of pre-Civil War America, the law was firmly on the side of evil and the dance often ended in death. It was a time when the newly formed country was deeply divided on the question of slavery and its fate hung in the balance. Just how long could a house divided against itself be expected to stand?

Surveying the sensational newspaper accounts as events unfolded, author and historian Chris Flook recounts this grisly tale of political intrigue and conspiracy.

In the fall of 1902, Indianapolis police uncovered a prolific graverobbing ring operating across the city. At the time, cemeteries across central Indiana were relieved of their dead by ghouls, as they were called, seeking fresh corpses desperately needed by the city's medical colleges. The ring was also accused of multiple murders. In Hamilton County, a former Confederate soldier named Wade West delivered stolen corpses by floating them down the White River. His counterpart in Indianapolis, Rufus Cantrell, an itinerant preacher and full-time graverobber known as the "King of the Ghouls," ransacked Indy's cemeteries for years before being caught.

Prior to the Civil War, thousands escaped slavery via the Underground Railroad. Untold others failed in the attempt.

These unfortunate souls were dragged into bondage via the Reverse Underground Railroad, as it came to be called. With more lines on both roads than any other state, the Free State of Ohio became a hunting ground for slavecatchers and kidnappers who roamed the North with impunity, seeking “fugitives” or any person of color who could be sold into slavery. And when they found one, they would kidnap their victim and head south to reap the reward.

David Meyers and Elise Meyers Walker, authors of Historic Black Settlements of Ohio, reveal not only the terror and injustice but also the bravery and determination born of this dark time in American history.

Author Brian Armstrong tells the shocking story of this "sundown town" and how it evolved into the diverse community that exists today.

On March 1, 1894, two African American men broke into a home in rural Franklin Park and murdered a white woman and her daughter before her husband fought and killed the attackers. The newspapers called it the "Franklin Park Tragedy," and the story captivated public attention nationally and abroad. Another tragedy came afterward, with the racist forced expulsion of many local African American residents.

Martha’s Vineyard has always been a unique island and vacation destination, made even more diverse with the arrival of Black homeowners in the 19th century.

Early landowners included the formerly enslaved Charles Shearer, who along with his wife Henrietta, founded Shearer Cottage. However, the fall of the first Black community on the island came in the 1890s when forty Black and Indigenous people were required to remove their cottages from the Martha’s Vineyard Camp Meeting Association. Despite this painful blow, other families, including the Wests, Jones and Huberts bought island homes, challenging restrictive and racist covenants that encumbered the properties. They then passed their homes on to subsequent generations, leading to a legacy of Black homeownership that thrives to this day. 

Authors Thomas Dresser and Richard Taylor explore the challenges, triumphs and the sense of community that has endured.

In many ways, the story of bondage in Virginia is the story of the state itself...

Richmond's 15th Street was known as Wall Street in antebellum times, and like its New York counterpart, it was a center of commerce. But the business done here was unspeakable and the scene heart wrenching. With over sixty-nine slave dealers and auction houses, the Wall Street area saw tens of millions of dollars and countless human lives change hands, fueling the southern economy. Local historian and author Jack Trammell traces the history of the city's slave trade, from the origins of African slavery in Virginia to its destruction at the end of the Civil War. Stories of seedy slave speculators and corrupt traders are placed alongside detailed accounts of the economic, political and cultural impact of a system representing the most immense, concentrated human suffering in our nation's history.

Discover a lost world of farmers cutting hay with scythes and dancing to fiddle music on barn floors through the Long Island paintings of William Sidney Mount.

Explore vivid depictions of people of color, presented with great humanity when racist caricatures were the norm.

This landmark book reveals the lives of Rachel, the eel spearer; Henry Brazier, the left-handed fiddler; George Freeman, model for the jaunty banjo player, and other agricultural laborers, domestic workers, and musicians who posed for the artist.

Authors Katherine Kirkpatrick and Vivian Nicholson-Mueller take readers on a fascinating historical journey as they publicly honor, by name, the once-anonymous Black and mixed-race models whose images have achieved international recognition.

Through a fascinating narrative and stunning vintage photographs, readers will discover the struggles and triumphs of the African Americans of Hampton Roads.

It was in Hampton Roads, Virginia, that hundreds gained their freedom. The teeming wharves were once a major station on the Underground Railroad, and during the Civil War, escaped slaves such as Shepard Mallory, Frank Baker and James Townsend fled to Fort Monroe to become contrabands under the protection of General Benjamin Butler. Upon arrival in the region, many took up arms for the Union, and the valiant deeds of some placed them among the first African American Medal of Honor recipients. Join Professor Cassandra L. Newby-Alexander as she charts the history of this remarkable African American community from the Civil War to Reconstruction.

Author and journalist Cody McDevitt tells the story of one of the worst civil rights injustices in Western Pennsylvania history.

In 1923, in response to the fatal shooting of four policemen, the mayor of Johnstown ordered every African American and Mexican immigrant who had lived in the city for less than seven years to leave. They were given less than a day to move or would face crippling fines or jail time and were forced out at gunpoint. An estimated two thousand people uprooted their lives in response to the racist edict. Area Ku Klux Klan members celebrated the creation of a "sundown town" and increased their own intimidation practices. Figures such as Marcus Garvey spoke out in Pittsburgh against it as newspapers throughout the country published condemnations.