The Journal of African American History

The slaveholder, kind or cruel, is a slaveholder still--the every hour violator of the just and inalienable rights of man; and he is, therefore, every hour silently whetting the knife of vengeance for his own throat. Frederick Douglass, My...

The question of African survivals in African American cultures in the New Worlds has been the subject of a long and intriguing controversy among scholars, with the emphasis of late being placed on the tracing of origins. Some scholars have argued that...

The year 1888 was an important one for W. E. B. Du Bois. He was chosen valedictorian of his class at Fisk University in Tennessee, and also was admitted to Harvard University for further education, a goal he had desired for many years. What is surprising...

For African American historians and scholars who achieved intellectual maturity during the 1960s, P. Sterling Stuckey's early work was at once challenging and reassuring. I well remember my own first encounter with his scholarship, particularly the...

William A. Link, Roots of Secession: Slavery and Politics in Antebellum Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Pp. 387. Cloth $45.00, paper $22.50. Thomas Jefferson, although a beneficiary of the institution, warned fellow...

The statue of Germania stands at the border of the German fatherland where the plunging Rhine murmurs its tales against its banks. In her raised right hand she holds a shining sword while the shield in her left hand glitters in the midday sun. Her...

Black Americans were sustained and healed and nurtured by the translation of their experience into art above all in the music. That was functional.... My parallel is always the music because all of the strategies of the art are there. All of...