Published inTimeline·May 14, 2018This Freedom Rider was shot at, attacked, and put on death row—all by 20 years oldJoan Trumpauer went from being a sheltered white southerner to a bold civil rights activist and Freedom Rider — Joan Trumpauer spent ten days in a Mississippi jail in the summer of 1961 before she was marched out of her cell and loaded into a bus. She’d been arrested for sitting in a whites-only waiting room in Jackson, Mississippi, with her fellow Freedom Riders — some white, like her…BlackLivesMatter6 min readBlackLivesMatter6 min read
Published inTimeline·Apr 4, 2018A white mob wiped this all-black Florida town off the map. 60 years later their story was finally toldEven by the standards of the 1920s South, the chain of events in Rosewood were unfathomable — Nine-year-old Minnie Lee Langley was outside with her mother on New Year’s Day 1923 when she saw them coming: a mob of white men marching toward her hometown of Rosewood, Florida. …Racism6 min readRacism6 min read
Published inLEVEL·Feb 27, 2018Member-onlyThe Black-Versus-White Basketball Game That Integrated the SportOver 70 years ago, the Harlem Globetrotters took on the Minneapolis Lakers, and changed hoops forever — When the Harlem Globetrotters and the Minneapolis Lakers played an exhibition game in Chicago in 1948, critics dismissed the contest as a publicity stunt. …Sports5 min readSports5 min read
Published inTimeline·Oct 26, 2017Even Nazi prisoners of war in Texas were shocked at how black people were treated in the SouthIn Texas, some of the Germans actually befriended Americans of all colors — One morning in the spring of 1943, years before the end of World War II, Huntsville, Texas woke up to a startling sound…War7 min readWar7 min read
Published inTimeline·May 19, 2017It’s the black working class—not white—that was hit hardest by industrial collapseIn places like Flint, Michigan, the story is very real — The streets were filled with jubilant crowds and awed journalists as a gold-plated car rolled off the General Motors assembly line in November of 1954. …Racism5 min readRacism5 min read
Published inTimeline·Mar 17, 2017Women took on the male leadership of the radical 1960s Puerto Rican movement and (mostly) wonMachismo was unrevolutionary — Denise Oliver fled the headquarters of Amiri Baraka’s Black Nationalist organization, Committee for Unified Newark, shortly after arriving— without her male companions. A founding member of the Young Lords Party, a militant group of Puerto Rican revolutionaries that first organized in East Harlem in 1969, Oliver was the only woman…Puerto Rico4 min readPuerto Rico4 min read
Published inTimeline·Mar 16, 2017Sylvia Rivera threw one of the first bottles in the Stonewall riots, but her activism went much further‘It was a fabulous feeling for me to be myself’ — Sylvia Rivera was a queen before her time. Born to a Puerto Rican father and Venezuelan mother in the Bronx in 1951, she was soon abandoned by her father and orphaned at age three when her mother committed suicide. Her grandmother adopted her, but had little love for her effeminate…LGBTQ6 min readLGBTQ6 min read
Published inTimeline·Mar 14, 2017One man’s dream of an all-black settlement came alive in Kansas, if only for a few decadesToday, the town of Nicodemus has just 21 residents — Benjamin Pap Singleton, born a slave in Tennessee, had a mission after the Civil War. He wanted former slaves to leave the South for a place he described as the promised land: Kansas. Singleton, a cabinet and coffin maker, believed that African Americans living in the South would never be…Racism5 min readRacism5 min read
Published inTimeline·Mar 9, 2017A town of freed slaves — on Robert E. Lee’s old estate — was destroyed to make Arlington cemeteryFreedman’s Village was a haven for so-called ‘contraband’ people — Sojourner Truth was outraged, but her feelings didn’t show in a letter she wrote about her meeting with Abraham Lincoln in October 1864. She’d gone to Lincoln to call his attention to the conditions at settlements for former slaves, including one called Freedman’s Village, where she asked to be appointed…BlackLivesMatter5 min readBlackLivesMatter5 min read
Published inTimeline·Mar 4, 2017The invention of ‘Hispanics’ created a political force of 27 million strongBefore 1970, they were considered white by the government — On a California morning in 1969, as dawn outlined the nearby mountain ridges in purple, a pickup truck bounced down a dirt road in the Coachella Valley, filled with activists urging farmhands still picking grapes to join a statewide strike for higher wages. …Puerto Rico5 min readPuerto Rico5 min read
