Remembering Lorraine Hansberry January 12, 2025 will mark the 50th anniversary of the death of one of America’s great playwrights, Lorraine Hansberry. She is best known as the author of A Raisin In the Sun, which opened on Broadway on March 11, 1959, at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. On the surface, the play tells the story of a family living on the South Side of Chicago that is faced with the difficult decision of how to spend $10,000 in life...

On July 2, 1839, Sengbe Pieh, better known as Joseph Cinqué, and some 50 or more fellow Africans killed the captain and three of the crew of the Spanish schooner La Amistad. The plan was to turn the vessel around and go back to Africa, from where they had been kidnapped and enslaved. They entrusted the Spanish navigator, Don Pedro Montez, whose life they spared, with steering the ship. He steered it along the North American coast off Montauk...

At 74, A. (Asa) Philip Randolph (1889-1979), the founder and president of the powerful union the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, approached the planning of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom with the full knowledge of the impact it would have. More than two decades earlier, in 1941, Randolph had threatened President Franklin D. Roosevelt with a similar peaceful demonstration, “A Call to Negro America to March on Washington for...

Above Image: Pepper Pot, A Scene in the Philadelphia Market, by John Lewis Krimmel, 1811. From the time the Isabella, carrying 150 Africans, arrived from Bristol, England, until 1780, when Pennsylvania passed the first emancipation law in the United States, the city had watched enslaved Africans disembark onto its docks in chains, to be sold on the corner of Front and Market Streets in front of the London Coffee House. Today on that corner...

In 2008 I stood in what was the nursery in a house called Travellers Rest in Nashville, Tennessee. I say “house,” although its former owner John Overton, a judge, banker, planter, the founder of the city of Memphis, and a slave owner—might have objected what he might have considered a puny term. It was a sizable home, built in 1799 and added on to and renovated over the next 120 or so years. Still, as part of a tour of the city, I had...

Often when we think of bicycle racing we think of the Tour de France, the multiple stage race held each year with teams of elite riders from around the world making their way on a grueling course through France and surrounding countries, ending with the winner crossing the finish line on the Champs Elysee in Paris. But years before the first ever Tour de France was held in 1903, bicycle racing gripped the American sports fan with a fervor that...