Then the House Un-American Activities Committee came for her — On September 22, 1950, musician Hazel Scott appeared in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. She’d been named as a subversive — another addition to a long list of those who were somehow plotting against America. Artists, Scott told the committee, “are eager and anxious to help, to serve…

When Toni Stone joined the Negro League, she became the first woman regular on a big-league team — “There’s always got to be a first in everything,” Toni Stone told Ebony in 1953. She knew what she was talking about. By that point, Stone had been the first in a lot of things: the first girl on her church’s baseball team; the first on a traveling barnstorming team…

When the media wasn’t adequately representing black lives, Black Omnibus showcased black art and thought in effortless ways — In a 1973 performance of “Don’t Explain,” the singer, actress, and dancer Paula Kelly sits alone, bathed in a golden light, sometimes vignetted with a soft seventies bokeh. Her performance took place in an episode of Black Omnibus, a variety and public affairs show hosted by James Earl Jones. …

‘The true voices of Black Liberation have been the Black musicians’ — In his 1966 essay “The Changing Same (R&B and New Black Music),” music critic Amiri Baraka (then known as LeRoi Jones) wrote, “We are bodies responding differently, a (total) force, like against you. You react to push it, re-create it. Resist it. It is the opposite pressure producing (in this…

Based in 1960s Harlem, they challenged the way stories of black lives were told, and who got to tell them — There’s a picture of Miles Davis, black-and-white, date unknown, with the long, lean figure of bassist Ron Carter at his side. Miles aficionados can deduce that it’s from the era of his second quintet, sometime between 1964 and 1968. Davis is seated, his body slightly bowed, trumpet pressed close to…

It rose, then fell — and popularized the kinds of songs it set out to defeat — In 1923, an ad for Black Swan Records placed in The Crisis, the NAACP’s magazine, helpfully sorted its consumer base into three groups. The first group, it said, was the one that supported black artists and black production, but their quality filter was a bit off. The second “class of…