“When I liberate myself, I liberate others. If you don’t speak out ain’t nobody going to speak out for you.” –– Fannie Lou Hamer

Fannie Lou Hamer (October 6, 1917 — March 14, 1977) was a women’s rights and voting rights activist. Born in rural Mississippi, she was known for her impassioned speeches and testimonials wherein she used scripture, hymnals, and straightforward real talk to lead the civil rights movement for Black women in the state, eventually co-founding the National Women’s Political Caucus. During her lifetime, Hamer was extorted, shot at, harassed, arrested, and brutally attacked for trying to register…

Crack: Cocaine, Corruption & Conspiracy, director Stanley Nelson’s latest documentary, is both a reminder and an eye-opening account of the horrors of crack and the country’s push to criminalize Black people struggling with drug addiction. Streaming on Netflix, it covers a lot of ground. Drawing from anecdotes from the Black and Brown people impacted by the “war on drugs” and archival footage from the 1980s and ’90s, the doc illustrates the ties between Reagan’s White House to Nicaragua and how a party drug for the elite was weaponized by police and the medical field to separate Black mothers from their…

A few years ago at a Radcliffe Institute exhibit, I came across photos of a draft of what would become Angela Davis’ autobiography. A foundational Black literary text, bare-boned and vulnerable, is not something you often get to see. The manuscript bloomed with the strokes of a blue pen, notes from the editor on what needed to be changed. In the caption of the photo, the editor’s name was noted: Toni Morrison.

There is so much power in that photo. It tells us a lot about Davis, but it tells us even more about Morrison. Morrison, one of the most…

Hands. Years ago, when my nearly 30-year-old daughter was closer to single-digit ages, I wanted to capture photographs of hands making and doing tasks. So I did. I created a sepia-toned set of photographs to display in my basement’s “play area.” My recently deceased grandmother’s hands lifting the lid on a pot of greens, my hands crafting a scrapbook, my daughter’s hands practicing for piano class—these photographs now reside on the wall of my condo along with one of those staged photographs that includes my even-longer-deceased mother. Four generations together.

These hands represent creativity. The ability to create, to “make…

As a little girl from the South, I always remembered Black History Month was a way for some people to feel better about themselves because they had a token Black friend. These same people still believe that, since they watched the movie Black Panther, they have done their part to help the Black community.

Even now during Black History Month, I have seen a steady increase of Black people on TV and in commercials. …

Imagine if you learned that photographs of your enslaved ancestors had been rediscovered in a museum at Harvard. Then imagine how you would feel if someone told you that you have no right to those photographs.

Such is the plight of Tamara Lanier, who has taken on the Ivy League behemoth to secure the rights to the photos, which languished in a drawer out of sight and away from the public eye for years. The daguerreotypes depict women and men, breasts and genitalia exposed, their haunting stares a riveting testament to the degradation our ancestors endured during slavery’s shameful reign.

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Black History Month serves a purpose, and I’m glad we have it. It doesn’t replace any other form of education but at the very least it could be a place to start for those who need to — and want to — know.

When I was little, my church Black History Month programs usually involved us wearing our version of what we thought African dress looked like, and reciting poems by Paul Lawrence Dunbar or Gwendolyn Brooks. We would make buttons that declared “I Am Somebody,” that statement first made popular in the ’80s by Rev. Jesse Jackson. …

Ida B. Wells isn’t the household name she should be, especially when it comes to her place alongside other early civil rights activists. Very much a contemporary of W.E.B. DuBois, who was six years her junior, and Booker T. Washington, six years her senior, Wells was a suffragist, anti-lynching activist, and co-founder of the NAACP. Thankfully, her great-granddaughter Michelle Duster is sharing these details in a new book, Ida B. the Queen: The Extraordinary Life and Legacy of Ida B. Wells. …