AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY
PERSPECTIVES
Perspectives on African American History features accounts and descriptions of important but little known events in African American history recalled often by those who were witnesses or participants or viewpoints about historical developments shaping the contemporary black world. Many of these accounts will be instant primary sources available to current visitors to BlackPast and to future historians. Each article is accompanied by a brief biography and photo of its author.
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Harmony In Transition: The Symbiotic Evolution of Gospel Music
The article below, written for BlackPast.org by Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., describes the role of gospel music in...
Taylor Electric Company (1922- )
In the article below historian Kathleen Thompson describes Taylor Electric Company, founded in 1922 and has the distinction of being...
Blaxploitation Reexamined: One Critic’s Reinterpretation
In the article below University of Washington School of Public Health Professor Clarence Spigner challenges us to take a more...
The Evolution of Slavery in Virginia, 1619 to 1661
As you will see below, historians agree that the first twenty Africans landed in Virginia in 1619. What is in...
In the Heat of the West: Woody Strode, Sergeant Rutledge, and the Buffalo Soldier
In the article below independent historian Clarence Spigner analyzes Sergeant Rutledge and the other major films of the college football...
The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies: A Brief History
In the article below, attorney and Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies Contributor Robert Gray describes the founding and...
Thaddeus H. Spratlen: Scholar and Philanthropist Generating Economic Change in Black America
On May 18, 2021, longtime University of Washington Professor Emeritus Thaddeus Spratlen died in Seattle, Washington at the age of...
We Can Best Honor Our Past by Not Burying It: The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921
In the article that follows Syracuse University historian Herbert G. Ruffin II takes us back in time to describe the...
Go Anyplace But Here, Please: The Fight to Train Black Nurses in San Diego
In the article below, independent historian Robert Fikes describes a little-known civil rights campaign in the late 1920s to desegregate...
