From the racism and poverty of the Jim Crow South, Willie Mays rose to the height of fame and respect as perhaps the country’s greatest baseball player – one who inspired a president.
The Hector Pieterson Memorial in Soweto honours school children who were murdered by apartheid police in June 1976.
Mujahid Safodien/AFP via Getty Images.
There has been a long history of resistance to white hegemony in the United States and South Africa.
Will Beyoncé’s new album help to break down racial barriers in the country music industry? Here she performs during the ‘On The Run’ tour on July 18, 2014 in Houston, Texas.
(Photo by Aaron M. Sprecher/Invision for Parkwood Entertainment/AP Images)
Beyoncé’s country-inspired album has caused a stir because the country music scene has a history of racial segregation that has erased its Black roots and gatekept it from Black artists.
Andra Day performs ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ prior to Super Bowl LVIII on Feb. 11, 2024.
Perry Knotts/Getty Image
Unlike some GOP politicians, a college professor who teaches Black history to mostly white students was excited that the Black national anthem was being played at the Super Bowl.
In this 1938 image, a Black boy uses a fountain marked ‘colored’ at a North Carolina county courthouse.
Getty Images
Though progressive politics at the turn of the 20th century called for the protection of America’s national parks, it did so for the enjoyment of white people.
Edward Blum stands in front of the U.S. Supreme Court on Oct. 20, 2022.
Shuran Huang for The Washington Post via Getty Images
Without much scrutiny or fanfare, Edward Blum has led the attack against federal minority voter protection laws and the use of race in college admissions.
Country singer Jason Aldean sings in front of the Maury County Courthouse in Columbia, Tenn.
Jason Aldean
Marlee Bunch, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
During the civil rights era, Black teachers were valued members of the community and often taught generations of family members.
Demonstrators hold Confederate flags near the monument for Confederacy President Jefferson Davis on June 25, 2015, in Richmond, Va., after it was spray-painted with the phrase ‘Black Lives Matter.’
AP Photo/Steve Helber
The drive to remove Confederate monuments links those monuments to modern racism. An economic historian shows that the intent and effect of those monuments from inception was to perpetuate racism.
SB 266 aims to stop college professors from teaching about systemic racism.
Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Tactics used to censor the teaching of American history in Florida schools bear much in common with those seen in the illiberal democracies of Israel, Turkey, Russia and Poland.
Joshua Houston leads a Juneteenth Parade in Huntsville, Texas, in a photo circa 1900.
Sam Houston Memorial Museum and Republic of Texas Presidential Library
For the formerly enslaved Black people in Texas, Juneteenth meant more than freedom. It meant reuniting families and building schools and developing political power.
The addition of a simple ‘Mr.’ or ‘Mrs.’ could be a quiet act of resistance.
Rae Tucker/Find a Grave
The pain of a brutal past and how to find healing is a theme shared between African Americans and black South Africans.
A group of voters lining up outside the polling station, a small Sugar Shack store, on May 3, 1966, in Peachtree, Ala., after the Voting Rights Act was passed the previous year.
MPI/Getty Images
Voter demographics and policy priorities are two recurrent, big issues on Election Day – but shifts in election administration and voting laws are new challenges influencing the midterms.
The son of a formerly enslaved mother, Charles Henry Turner was the first to discover that bees and other insects have the ability to modify their behavior based on experience.
Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., left, and attorney Fred Gray, whom King called ‘the brilliant young Negro who later became the chief counsel for the protest movement,’ at a political rally in Tuskegee, Alabama, April 29, 1966.
AP Photo/Jack Thornell
When Rosa Parks was arrested for sitting in the front of a bus in Montgomery, Fred Gray was her lawyer. Now he’s being honored for a lifetime of civil rights advocacy.
Managing Director of the McCourtney Institute of Democracy, Associate Research Professor, Political Science, Co-host of Democracy Works Podcast, Penn State