In 1937, Franklin Delano Roosevelt officially designated “Columbus Day” as a federal holiday. It commemorates the 1492 arrival of Italian explorer, Christopher Columbus, in the Americas. The colonial and imperialist elements of Columbus’ voyage, however, have made the holiday perennially controversial. Columbus and the Europeans who followed him brought diseases that ravaged the existing population, […]
Tag: history
In February of 2018, during Black History Month, I had the honor of co-leading a pilgrimage to Charleston, South Carolina. That city served as the major point of entry on the East Coast for newly arrived black slaves. The deplorable institution of race-based chattel slavery shaped the entire history of the city and the state […]
After reading dozens of U.S. history books for my PhD coursework this year, I find myself circling back to a few works time and again. So I decided to put them in a of list my ten favorite history books that I read in 2017. I say “favorite” because this list is entirely subjective and […]
NOTE: This article originally appeared in “Opinion” section of the New York Times. JACKSON, Miss. — When President Trump decided at the last minute to attend the grand opening of the Museum of Mississippi History and the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum here on Saturday, the museums’ staff flew into overdrive. I saw it in their sincere but […]
Note: This article originally appeared in the Jackson Clarion-Ledger. An Emmett Till marker has been vandalized yet again, and the form of vandalism symbolizes a larger story. While defacing a marker is nothing new, this is the first time a sign has been erased. Clarion-Ledger journalist Jerry Mitchell quoted Davis Houck of the Emmett Till Memory […]
June 17 marks the anniversary of the murder of the Emanuel Nine. A white supremacist sat through a Bible study at the historic Emanuel AME church in Charleston, South Carolina and then he started firing. In the end, nine black believers lay dead. We say their names: Rev. Clementa Pickney (41) Cynthia Hurd (54) Rev. […]
While it is true that most systematic and written forms of Reformed theology come from Caucasian males, Reformed theology is not the “white man’s religion.” No matter how you define it, the core tenets of Reformed theology are woven into the fabric of African American Christianity. The sovereignty of God over all of life, his […]