Virtual Bookshelf: Black History Month

Celebrate Black History Month with this selection of NEH-funded projects and resources related to African American history and culture:

NEH-Funded Projects:

Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian's Legacy
Belle da Costa Greene was one of the prominent librarians in American history, known for the instrumental role she played in building the exceptional collection of rare books and manuscripts formed by American financier J. Pierpont Morgan, who hired her as his personal librarian in 1905. To mark the centenary of the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, the institution is honoring the life and legacy of its inaugural director with a major NEH-supported exhibition, on view until May 4, 2025. Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian’s Legacy traces Greene’s storied life, from her roots in a predominantly Black community in Washington, D.C., to her distinguished career at the helm of one of the world’s great research libraries. Read more about the exhibition at The New York Times, The New Yorker, and NPR.

Regeneration: Black Cinema 1898-1971, a NEH-funded exhibition by The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, explores the history of Black participation in cinema in the United States Inspired by and named after an independent all-Black-cast movie from 1923, Regeneration seeks to revive lost or forgotten films, filmmakers and performers. View a digital version of the exhibition online. Learn more about the exhibition, which opened in Los Angeles at The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures before traveling to the Detroit Institute of Art, at The Los Angeles Times, PBS News Hour, and The Detroit News.

John Lewis: A Life
Born into poverty in rural Alabama, John Lewis rose to prominence in the civil rights movement, becoming second only to Martin Luther King, Jr. in his contributions. As a Freedom Rider, he played a crucial role in integrating bus stations across the South. Lewis was a prominent leader in the Nashville sit-in movement and delivered a historic speech at the 1963 March on Washington. As the youngest speaker and chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), he transformed it into a major civil rights organization. His legacy endures through the harrowing events at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, where he survived a brutal beating on “Bloody Sunday.” Written with support from an NEH Public Scholars grant, David Greenberg’s John Lewis: A Life is the first full-fledged biography of the civil rights leader and U.S. Congressman. Read reviews at the New York Times and the New Yorker. 

Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica

As the first major exhibition to survey Pan-Africanism’s cultural manifestations, the NEH-funded Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica gathers together some 350 objects, spanning the 1920s to the present, made by artists on four continents: Africa, North and South America, and Europe. The exhibition is currently display at the Art Institute of Chicago until March 30, 2025. Read reviews at WBEZ Chicago, the Chicago Sun Times, and The Art Newspaper.The Art Newspaper.

Changing the Face of Democracy: Shirley Chisholm at 100
Shirley Chisholm was the first Black woman elected to Congress and the first woman to run for president on a major party ticket. To commemorate the centennial of the birth of Shirley Chisholm, the Museum of the City of New York and the Shirley Chisholm Project used an NEH Public Programs grant to create the first major museum exhibition on the life and legacy of the politician. The exhibition is open through July 2025.

American Coup: Wilmington 1898
The NEH-funded documentary series American Coup: Wilmington 1898 sheds light on an important and little-known piece of U.S. history —the only successful coup d’état on American soil. The PBS American Experience documentary traces the history of the deadly race massacre and carefully orchestrated insurrection which took place in North Carolina’s largest city in 1898. Watch now on PBS.

SNCC and Grassroots Organizing: Building a More Perfect Union
The SNCC Legacy Project used an NEH grant to develop a discussion series at HBCUs and museums focusing on SNCC’s grassroots community organizing. The series focuses on six key themes that are integral to SNCC’s history of grassroots organizing: organizing tradition, voting rights, Black Power, women and gender, freedom teaching, and art and culture. Find an upcoming event near you.

Bring Judgment Day: Reclaiming Leadbelly’s Truths from Jim Crow’s Lies
Author Sheila Curran Bernard used a NEH Public Scholars grant to research and write this biography of blues performer Huddie Ledbetter, also known as Lead Belly, challenging the myth that he was a violent criminal. Sheila Curran Bernard examines arrest, trial, and prison records, sharecropping reports, oral histories, and newspaper articles, adding context to the narrative about the performer. Read an interview with Bernard about the book at the Albany Times-Union. 

The Birth of Breaking: Hip-Hop History from the Floor Up
Serouj Aprahamian tells the untold history of how breaking – one of the most widely practiced dance forms in the world today – began as a distinctly African American expression in the Bronx, New York, during the 1970s in this new NEH-supported book.

Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History
Laura E. Helton used an NEH summer stipend to write Scattered and Fugitive Things, about the African American bibliophiles, scrapbookers, and librarians who built collections chronicling the history of African Americans during the twentieth century. Helton’s book highlights the importance of tradition of collecting in African American history for the past, present, and future.

Banking on Slavery: Financing Southern Expansion in the Antebellum United States
NEH Fellow Sharon Ann Murphy provides an in-depth examination of how deeply nineteenth-century American banks were entwined with the institution of slavery. Murphy explores the connection between American capitalism and the dehumanizing institution of slavery.

Fit Citizens: A History of Black Women’s Exercise from Post-Reconstruction to Postwar America
Ava Purkiss’ new NEH-funded book explores the intersections between Black womanhood, exercise, and citizenship from the 1890s to the 1950s. The first historical study on Black women’s exercise, Fit Citizens shows the important role Black women have played in the history of American physical fitness.

Harlem in Disorder: A Spatial History of How Racial Violence Changed in 1935
Stephen Robertson of George Mason University used an NEH Fellowship to write this digital publication analyzing the racially based unrest in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City on March 19, 1935.

Black Ball: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Spencer Haywood, and the Generation that Saved the Soul of the NBA
NEH Public Scholar Theresa Runstedtler tells the story of how a generation of Black pro basketball players, including Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Spencer Haywood, shaped the NBA.

The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church
In 1838, a group of America’s most prominent Catholic priests sold 272 enslaved people to save their largest mission project, what is now Georgetown University. In her NEH Public Scholars book, journalist and professor Rachel Lucille Swarns follows one family through nearly two centuries of indentured servitude and enslavement, shedding light on how slavery fueled the growth of the American Catholic Church in the nineteenth century.

The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts
In 1857, a woman escaped enslavement on a North Carolina plantation and fled to a farm in New York. In hiding, she worked on a manuscript that would make her famous long after her death. The novel, The Bondwoman’s Narrative, was first published in 2002 to great acclaim, but the author’s identity remained unknown. Over a decade later, Gregg Hecimovich unraveled the mystery of the author’s name. His NEH Public Scholars book, The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts tells the story of the first Black female novelist and her life as an enslaved woman.

The Sisterhood: How a Network of Black Women Writers Changed American Culture
One Sunday afternoon in February 1977, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange, and several other Black women writers met at June Jordan’s Brooklyn apartment to eat gumbo, drink champagne, and talk about their work. Calling themselves “The Sisterhood,” the group—which also came to include Audre Lorde, Paule Marshall, Margo Jefferson, and others—would get together once a month over the next two years, creating a vital space for Black women to discuss literature and liberation. Written with support from an NEH Public Scholars grant,  Courtney Thorsson’s Sisterhood looks at how this network of Black women writers in the 1970s transformed American culture.

Blackbird: How Black Musicians Sang the Beatles into Being—and Sang Back to Them Ever After
Katie Kapurch used an NEH grant to write Blackbird: How Black Musicians Sang the Beatles into Being—and Sang Back to Them Ever After, a cultural history of African Americans’ musical conversations with the Beatles from the late 1960s to today.

The Harvest: Integrating Mississippi's Schools
In this NEH grant-funded documentary Pulitzer Prize-winning author Douglas A. Blackmon reflects on how school integration transformed his hometown of Leland, Mississippi. In 1969—15 years after Brown v. Board of Education—the Supreme Court ordered that Mississippi schools fully — and immediately — desegregate. As a result, a group of children, including six-year-old Blackmon, became part of the first class of Black and white children who would attend all 12 grades together in Leland. It tells the extraordinary story of how that first class became possible, then traces the lives of Blackmon and his classmates, teachers and parents from the first day through high school graduation in 1982. Stream the documentary at PBS American Experience.

A Union of Hope: 1869 at the Tenement Museum
The Tenement Museum in New York recently opened a new permanent exhibition, A Union of Hope: 1869, supported by an NEH grant. The exhibition explores the story of Joseph and Rachel Moore, Black New Yorkers who made their home in Lower Manhattan’s tenements in the 1860s and 1870s.

Black Orpheus: Jacob Lawrence and the Mbari Club
On view at the Chrysler Museum of Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art, and the Toledo Museum of art throughout 2023, this NEH-funded exhibition explored the connection between African American artist Jacob Lawrence and his contemporaries based in West Africa through the Nigerian publication Black Orpheus. The exhibition featured over 125 objects, including Lawrence’s little-known 1964–65 Nigeria series, works by the artists featured in Black Orpheus, archival images, videos, and letters.

Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad 
Over one million African American men and women served in World War II. Matthew F. Delmont’s recent book Half American, supported by an NEH Public Scholars grant, provides a history of these heroes rarely talked about. Read an excerpt of the book at Smithsonian Magazine, or see Delmont discuss his research at Washington Post Live.

All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake
A 2021 National Book Award winner, Tiya Miles’ All That She Carried traces the poignant human history behind a single artifact—an embroidered mid-1800s cotton sack on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture—through the lives of three generations of Black women. Researched and written with support from an NEH Public Scholars award, the book “honors the creativity and fierce resourcefulness of people who preserved family ties even when official systems refused to do so, and it serves as a visionary illustration of how to reconstruct and recount their stories today,” per its publisher, Penguin Random House. Read an excerpt at NEH’s HUMANITIES magazine.

Marian Anderson: The Whole World in Her Hands
This NEH-funded documentary from PBS’s American Experience explores the life, career, art, and legacy of the famous singer who became an icon for the civil rights movement. The documentary draws on Anderson’s key performances and archival interviews to show how her quiet genius and breathtaking voice set the stage for Black performers in classical music.

Timeline of African American Music
This interactive digital resource from Carnegie Hall lets students, educators, researchers, and music lovers explore the rich history, evolution, and influence of African American music genres dating back more than 400 years, from the earliest folk traditions to present-day popular music. Made possible with support from NEH grants, the timeline is both a historical study and a celebration of living musical traditions. The timeline is organized into three content threads—Sacred Traditions, Secular Traditions, and Jazz Secular Traditions—and offers information on more than 50 musical genres with ties to African American traditions from spirituals and ragtime to jazz and hip-hop, alongside in-depth studies of pioneering musicians who created some of America’s most timeless artistic expressions.

The American Diplomat
The NEH-funded PBS American Experience documentary The American Diplomat explores the lives and legacies of three African American ambassadors—Edward Dudley, Terence Todman and Carl Rowan—who pushed past historical and institutional racial barriers to reach high-ranking appointments in the Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations. At the height of the civil rights movement in the United States, the three men were asked to represent the best of American ideals abroad while facing discrimination at home. Through rare archival footage, in-depth oral histories, and interviews with family members, colleagues and diplomats, the film paints a portrait of three men who left a lasting impact on the content and character of the Foreign Service and changed American diplomacy forever. Stream online at PBS.

Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America
Written by Marcia Chatelain with support from an NEH Fellowship, Franchise investigates the complex interrelationship between Black communities and America’s largest, most popular fast food chain. Taking us from the first McDonald’s drive-in in San Bernardino to the franchise on Florissant Avenue in Ferguson, Missouri, in the summer of 2014, Chatelain shows how fast food is a source of both power—economic and political—and despair for African Americans. Franchise was awarded the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in History. Read an interview with Marcia Chatelain about her award-winning book at NEH’s HUMANITIES magazine.

African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song
One of the great American art forms, African American poetry encompasses many kinds of verse: formal, experimental, vernacular, lyric, and protest. Edited by Kevin Young, this Library of America anthology gathers material from 250 Black poets from the colonial period to the present. The volume, published in 2020, is the centerpiece of Lift Every Voice, a national public humanities initiative made possible with NEH support. Read an interview with poet Kevin Young about the project at NEH’s HUMANITIES magazine.

Driving While Black: Race, Space, and Mobility in America
Discover how the advent of the automobile brought new mobility and freedom for African Americans but also exposed them to discrimination and deadly violence, and how that history resonates today. Chronicling the riveting history and personal experiences—at once liberating and challenging, harrowing and inspiring, deeply revealing and profoundly transforming—of African Americans on the road from the advent of the automobile through the seismic changes of the 1960s and beyond—the NEH-funded documentary Driving While Black explores the deep background of a recent phrase rooted in realities that have been an indelible part of the African-American experience for hundreds of years – told in large part through the stories of the men, women and children who lived through it. Available for streaming on the PBS website.

Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America
Candacy Taylor’s NEH Public Scholar book, Overground Railroad, takes on the theme of Black travel and explores the historical role and residual impact of the Green Book, a travel guide for Black motorists published from 1936 to 1966.

The Papers of Martin Luther King Jr.
Since 1986 NEH has funded the collection, editing, and publication of the definitive edition of the speeches, sermons, correspondence, public statements, published writings, and unpublished manuscripts of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. Under the direction of Stanford University historian Clayborne Carson, the project has to date published seven volumes of King’s papers, documenting King’s family roots, rise to prominence, and influence as a national spokesperson for civil rights.

The Heavens Might Crack: The Death and Legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.
On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was fatally shot as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. At the time of his murder, King was a polarizing figure—scorned by many white Americans, worshipped by some African Americans and liberal whites, and deemed irrelevant by many black youth. NEH Public Scholar Jason C. Sokol traces the diverse responses, both in America and throughout the world, to King’s death, presenting a deeply moving account of how Americans grappled with King’s death and legacy in the days, weeks, and months after his assassination.

Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart
This Peabody Award-winning documentary explores the inner life and works of the activist, playwright, and author of A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry. The film draws from Hansberry’s personal papers and archives, including home movies and rare photos, and examines the influences that shaped her childhood, future art, and activism. The NEH-funded film premiered on PBS’s American Masters in 2018. Read about the film at NEH’s HUMANITIES magazine.

Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America
W. Caleb McDaniel’s Pulitzer Prize-winning NEH Public Scholars book Sweet Taste of Liberty tells the epic tale of Henrietta Wood, a Black woman who survived kidnapping and re-enslavement and successfully sued her captor for damages, receiving the largest settlement ever awarded by an American court in restitution for slavery.

Mr. SOUL!
This award-winning 2021 documentary explores the first nationally broadcast all-Black variety show on public television, Ellis Haizlip’s SOUL! Premiering in 1968, the pioneering series ran for five years, cementing itself as not only a vehicle to celebrate African-American artistry, community, and culture, but also as a platform for political expression and a powerful force in the fight for social justice. The NEH-funded Mr. SOUL! portrays in exquisite detail a revolutionary time in American culture and entertainment through vibrant archival footage and interviews with numerous Black luminaries who appeared on SOUL! or were impacted by it.

Dunbar Project
An NEH grant supported a three-year place-based learning initiative and curriculum development project at the University of Dayton focusing on the life, works, and legacy of poet, novelist, short-story writer, and Dayton native Paul Laurence Dunbar. The project  developed linked courses around Dunbar’s work, introduce students and faculty to digital humanities tools and investigative methods, and facilitate cross-disciplinary teaching and broaden engagement with Dunbar-related cultural materials.

Colored Conventions Project
From 1830 until well after the Civil War, African Americans gathered across the United States and Canada to participate in political meetings held at the state and national level. A cornerstone of Black organizing in the nineteenth century, these “colored conventions” brought Black men and women together in a decades-long campaign for civil and human rights. The NEH-funded Colored Conventions Project at the University of Delaware offers interactive, digital exhibits of historical images and documents to provide insight into these gatherings and expand our understanding of early Black organizing.

Freedom Riders
Hear the stories of the more than 400 black and white Americans who risked violent attacks and imprisonment for traveling together on buses through the segregated South as part of the 1961 Freedom Rides. This powerful NEH-supported 2011 documentary by Stanley Nelson tells the harrowing and ultimately inspirational story of six months that changed America forever. Available streaming online at PBS’s American Experience.

Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home
NEH Public Scholar Richard J. Bell recounts the gripping, true story of five boys who were kidnapped in Philadelphia in 1825 and smuggled into slavery in the Deep South—and their daring attempt to escape and bring their captors to justice. Their ordeal—an odyssey that takes them from the Philadelphia waterfront to the marshes of Mississippi and then onward still—shines a glaring spotlight on the Reverse Underground Railroad, a black market network of human traffickers and slave traders who stole away thousands of legally free African Americans from their families in order to fuel slavery’s rapid expansion in the decades before the Civil War.

The Jazz Ambassadors
The Cold War and civil rights collide in this remarkable story of music, diplomacy, and race. Beginning in 1955, when America asked its greatest jazz artists to travel the world as cultural ambassadors, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Dave Brubeck, and their racially diverse band members faced a painful dilemma: How could they represent a country that still practiced Jim Crow segregation? This NEH-funded documentary premiered on PBS in 2018. Check local listings for re-broadcasts, and find related classroom resources for students in grades 6-12 at PBS’s Learning Media site.

Freedmen and Southern Society Project
Long-term NEH funding to the Freedmen and Southern Society project at the University of Maryland, is supporting research and editorial work on Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, a nine-volume documentary history of the transition from slavery to freedom in the U.S. South. The project’s editors pored over millions of documents in the National Archives, selecting some 50,000 to transcribe, organize, and annotate to illustrate how Black people traversed the bloody ground from slavery to freedom between the beginning of the Civil War in 1861 and the beginning of Radical Reconstruction in 1867.

Teenie Harris Archive
Charles "Teenie" Harris (1908–1998) photographed Pittsburgh's African American community from around 1935 to 1975. His archive of nearly 80,000 images is one of the most detailed and intimate records of the black urban experience known today. NEH grants have funded preservation of his photographs, the first major retrospective exhibition and web resource celebrating Teenie Harris’s work and legacy, and a set of digital tools that uses the collection at the Carnegie Museum of Art as a test case for the development of open-source software to facilitate the identification and annotation of digitized images.

The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross
Scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. recounts the full trajectory of African-American history in his groundbreaking six-part series that takes viewers across five hundred years and two continents to shed new light on the experience of being an African American. The NEH-funded six-hour series and accompanying educational materials are available through PBS.

Call My Name: Documenting the Black Experience in an American University
NEH grants to Clemson University’s Call My Name project have supported both a two-day digitization event to collect materials regarding the under-documented contributions and stories of African Americans at Clemson University and the surrounding community, as well as the creation of a traveling exhibition examining the history of the African Americans who worked on the land that became Clemson University. The project records, represents, and solicits the experiences of six generations of African Americans in a microcosm of American history and racial politics in Clemson, South Carolina. Hear project director Rhondda Robinson Thomas speak about plans for the “Call My Name” traveling exhibition.

Move on Up: Chicago Soul Music and Black Cultural Power
Curtis Mayfield. The Chi-Lites. Chaka Khan. Chicago’s place in the history of soul music is rock solid. But for Chicagoans, soul music in its heyday from the 1960s to the 1980s was more than just a series of hits: it was a marker and a source of black empowerment. In Move On Up, NEH Public Scholar Aaron Cohen tells the remarkable story of the explosion of soul music in Chicago.

Tell Them We Are Rising
A haven for Black intellectuals, artists, and revolutionaries—and a path of promise toward the American dream—Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) have educated the architects of freedom movements and cultivated leaders in every field while remaining unapologetically Black for more than 150 years. Stanley Nelson’s NEH-funded documentary examines the history of America’s HBCUs and their role as a key driver of Black social, political, and economic progress. Classroom resources for high school students related to the film are available at PBS’s LearningMedia.

African American Families Database
Map the journey of African American families before and after the Civil War with this online database of genealogical records from Albemarle County, Virginia. This digital humanities project from Central Virginia History Researchers is a partnership among local historians, anthropologists, genealogists, and community residents designed to connect African American families to their antebellum roots and trace patterns of community formations in the postbellum period.

Credo
W.E.B. DuBois’s prose poem “Credo” proclaimed his philosophy of racial equality. Read the personal correspondence and writings of this intellectual leader and founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in this online archive of DuBois’s papers, created through an NEH grant to the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

Sammy Davis, Jr.: I’ve Gotta Be Me
This NEH-supported film is the first major documentary to examine the performer’s vast career and his journey for identity through the shifting tides of civil rights and racial progress during twentieth-century America. Through interviews, never-before-seen photographs, and footage of Davis’s performances in television, film, and concert, the documentary explores the life and art of a uniquely gifted entertainer whose trajectory paralleled the major flashpoints of American society, from the Depression through the 1980s. Available at PBS’s American Masters.

Music in the American South
Much of the music from the American South has been influenced by African Americans. From B.B. King in Mississippi to Lil Nas X in Georgia, explore some recent NEH-supported projects from Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, and Arkansas focusing on music and its connections to the humanities.   

The Late Valerie Boyd Was a Writer, an Editor, and a Friend of the Humanities
Valerie Boyd’s biography Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston is the first biography of Zora Neale Hurston in 25 years. 

Jump at the Sun
Discover the history of Eatonville, Florida, in this series in which scholars look at the first incorporated Black municipality in the country and the hometown of Zora Neale Hurston. 

State Humanities Councils:
Many of NEH’s local partners throughout the country, the state and jurisdictional humanities councils, will host public programs and workshops in celebration of Black History Month. The Florida Humanities-funded From the Heights exhibition will be on view at the Museum of Art and Design at MDC until March 15, featuring works by South Florida native, Kabuya Pamela Bowens-Saffo. On February 13, Connecticut Humanities will be partnering with MoCA CT for a special screening of DELA: The Making of El Anatsui, a documentary about the life and work of El Anatsui, one of Africa’s most celebrated sculptors. Throughout February, Colorado Humanities is sponsoring the Black History Live tour, featuring living-history portrayals of Harriet Tubman and Louis Armstrong. Check your local humanities council for additional events and resources.

EDSITEment
NEH’s education website, EDSITEment, offers a curated selection of lesson plans, close readings, and classroom resources geared toward educators and families on a variety of topics. EDSITEment’s African American History and Culture in the United States teacher’s guide brings together curriculum and lesson plans, articles, and primary sources on significant events and individuals in African American history. The site offers lesson plans for high school students on the competing voices of the civil rights movement, Frederick Douglass’s 1845 autobiography,  AfricanAmerican soldiers after World War I, and the music of African American history. For younger students, lesson plans on African American communities in the North, and the Green Book suggest readings and discussion questions for middle school classrooms.

Blog Posts:
Preserving the American Black Journal
Celebrating Black History Month Part I: Slavery and Abolition
Celebrating Black History Month Part II: Reconstruction
Celebrating Black History Month Part III: Documenting the Civil Rights Era—From Famous Figures to Everyday Life
Chronicling America Dispatches: “Published for the elevation of our race”: Ten Historical African American South Carolina Newspapers in Chronicling America
Spreading the Word on the History of African American Religion
Double Victory in Black and White: What Digitized Historical Newspapers Reveal about the African American Experience of WWII
Documenting Lost African-American Newspapers
Cecil E. Newman: Newspaper Publisher and Advocate for Minnesota’s Black Community
Silent No More: Lifting the Veil on Women and People of Color in Silent and Short Film
Humanities Researchers Remember the Slave Trade and its Abolition

NEH’s HUMANITIES Magazine:
How Black Suffragists Fought for the Right to Vote and a Modicum of Respect
Black Poetry Anthologized
Black on Black: Louis Draper Made His Subjects Visible
South to Freedom
In the Land of Snow and Fargo, a Legacy of Black Writing Emerges
A Voyage to Freedom
Atlanta, School Teachers, and the History of Race Relations
Celebrating Freedom
St. Louis’s First Black Detective Always Cracked the Case
The Right to Love
Black Mozart
From American Playhouse to 12 Years a Slave
Marcia Chatelain on Fast Food and Black Capitalism
The 1921 Tulsa Massacre
Story Cloths
Historian of the Negro Leagues
William Lanson Shaped New Haven
Black Swan Rising
“The Sweat and Blood of Fannie Lou Hamer”
The People and Places of Black Bottom, Detroit
What Zora Went Looking For
The Art of Alma Thomas Comes Full Circle at the Phillips
August Wilson's Blues Poetry
Invisible Man at Seventy
Artists Reinterpret the Great Migration
Jacob Lawrence in Nigeria
The Sonnet Man Brings Hip-Hop to Shakespeare
The Value of Difference
A Voice for Freedom
The Marvels of Byzantine Africa
The Long Afterlife of Anne and Emmett
“Come Prepared to Travel. Bring Guitar.”
How the Civil Rights Movement Rewrote Freedom of the Press
Wilmington, 1898: The Unsupressed History of a Massacre