Simeon Booker, then a reporter for Jet magazine, was a witness to history on the day in 1955 when Mamie Till Mobley stared at the bloodied and bloated body of…
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Black journalist Alexander M. Rivera, who covered Willie Earle lynching trial, recalls tension, fear
Alexander M. Rivera, a Black reporter and photographer for The Pittsburgh Courier, was on assignment to cover “the trial of the century” as he and others described it to readers,…
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Breathlessly, the man scrambled along the railroad tracks, barely catching the next northbound train out of town. He bought his ticket onboard and tried to swallow a sense of foreboding.
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He boarded the northbound train in Baltimore dressed as a sailor. He carried questionable identification documents, and some travel money given him by the woman he soon would marry.
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The words were meant to be spoken, not sung. It was supposed to be a speech honoring Abraham Lincoln—born nine decades earlier, assassinated half a century later, yet still revered…
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Ida B. Wells-Barnett had a special connection to Thomas Moss, and didn’t understand how he could have done what they said he had.
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The question of slavery, and whether and when it should end, divided America from its inception, and eventually moved the nation toward Civil War. The dispute reached a peak on…
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Billie Holiday looks at the stage floor, then takes a deep breath. She gazes straight into the audience and begins to sing, “Southern trees bear a strange fruit./ Blood on…
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A white-owned Mississippi newspaper justified the 1907 lynching of Henry Sykes, a Black man who was hanged by a mob, writing: “When there is no law to reach the offender…the…
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During the late 19th and early 20th century, thousands of photographs and postcards of Black Americans killed by white mobs in racist terror lynchings were collected, traded and sent through…
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