James Weldon Johnson

What an old poem says about the search for justice following the Capitol riot.

Scholars agree the song, endowed with its deep history of Black pride, speaks to the universal human condition.

In 1920, James Weldon Johnson went to Washington, armed with census data, to fight rampant voter suppression across the American South.

How the focus on Harlem obfuscated Black culture in the Midwest.

In 1871, the Fisk University singers embarked on a tour that introduced white Americans to a Black sound that would reshape the nation.

The confluence of Black modernity, self-determinism, and belongingness of Harlem's housing.

The most significant impact of the Senate’s super majority rules.

Here's what we've learned about mass protests since the 1917 Silent Parade.

Yale's Beinecke Library marks the centennial of 10,000 people marching through New York City, one of the earliest African American civil rights demonstrations.

Remembering the "Silent Protest Parade."

On these pages you will meet Monroe Nathan Work, who lived from 1866- 1945. This website is a rebirth of one piece of his work.

The Garland Fund was not a typical foundation, but its history shows the potential role philanthropy can play in moments of rising authoritarianism.

Trump’s baseless claims about migrants in Ohio reflect a long history of prejudice against Haitians. In Washington, those falsehoods have driven policy.

How Black artists made modernism their own.

How James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, and others embraced a new Black humanism.

On Laura Helton’s “Scattered and Fugitive Things.”

The creators of Yale’s Civil War Memorial were more concerned with honoring “both sides” than with the true meaning of the war.

Just before a lynch mob was to face trial in Florida in 1926, a storm hit.

Her performances of the Black spiritual in the nineteen-thirties caused American and European audiences to fall silent in awe.

I had sung the Black National Anthem countless times, but hearing those words reverberate around me in this place, on this day, moved me in a new way.