Ta-Nehisi Coates

Navigating the line between historical records and mystic imagery to understand the Underground Railroad.

Why songs of the southland are really northern.

Sheryll Cashin’s “White Space, Black Hood” shows how economic discrimination combines with racial injustice in America’s housing policy.

William Darity and A. Kirsten Mullen’s case for reparations.

"My job as your mother is to tell you these stories differently, and to tell you other stories that don’t get told at school.”

We need to do far more than “give voice to the voiceless" to win justice.

1619, 1776, and the politics of the past.

After Charlottesville, the historian Joan Wallach Scott wanted to find out how societies face up to their past—and why some fail.

A new proposal for reparations for slavery raises three critical questions: How much does America owe? Where will the money come from? And who gets paid?

In our current politics we must be attentive to how talk of American freedom has long been connected to the presumed right of whites to dominate everyone else.

Cameron Laux looks at how The Age of Innocence – published 100 years ago – marked a pivotal moment in US history.

Who should be allowed to profit from depictions of traumatic events in Black history?

An artist-activist catalogues the physical remnants of 'segregation walls,' unassuming bits of racist infrastructure that hide in plain sight in neighborhoods.

The answer may lie in the ear of the beholder.

Frank B. Wilderson III sketches a map of the world in which Black people are everywhere integral but always excluded.

But in 1862, the federal government doled out the 2020 equivalent of $23 million—not to the formerly enslaved but to their white enslavers.

In fact, Black activists and civil rights leaders have been advocating for compensation for the trauma and cost of slavery for centuries.

Social movements that have pushed for inclusion and equality in the South have often evaded or ignored the issue of Native land and sovereignty.

This fall 500 Louisianans, in 19th-century attire, will re-create America’s largest plantation uprising.

The New York Times’ series on slavery relies on bad scholarship to make an argument with an inauspicious history.