African Americans

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  4/11/2020
  

  The Pathology of American Racism is Making the Pathology of the Coronavirus Worse

  by Stacey Patton

  Black America is ground zero for covid-19.

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• SOURCE: The Undefeated
  4/1/2020
  

  In 1918 and 2020, Race Colors America’s Response to Epidemics

  Race and ethnicity have been, and continue to be, enormous factors in determining whether people will receive medical attention when they become ill, and the sort of attention they will receive.

• 
• 11/17/19
  

  Cracked Foundations: The Case for Reparations

  by Julia Brown

  Compensation for historically disadvantaged minorities is nothing new.

• 
• SOURCE: History Channel
  June 24, 2019
  

  How the GI Bill's Promise Was Denied to a Million Black WWII Veterans

  by Erin Blakemore

  The sweeping bill promised prosperity to veterans. So why didn’t black Americans benefit?

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• 6-7-16
  

  The Rape Scenes in “Roots” Suggest Why DNA Studies of African Americans Are so Vital

  by Pearl Duncan

  Using DNA can help reveal the hell that was slavery.

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• African American Voters Need to Channel Their Power in State Elections

  by Rawn James, Jr.

  Last month Americans marked the sixty-fifth anniversary of President Harry S. Truman’s signing Executive Order 9981 to desegregate America’s armed forces. African Americans had fought in every American war, including the Revolutionary War, but had done so in segregated units, often relegated to menial labor tasks. By the time President Truman issued Executive Order 9981, eliminating segregation and racial discrimination in the armed forces had become the single most important national issue to African American voters. Their cause was national in both scope and purpose.

• SOURCE: TheRoot
  4-08-13
  

  Was Jackie Robinson Court-Martialed?

  On April 15, 1947, at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, N.Y., Jack Roosevelt Robinson, at the age of 28, became the first African American to play for a major-league baseball team since the 1884 season, when Moses Fleetwood "Fleet" Walker played for the Toledo Blue Stockings between May 1 and Sept. 4. (William White, a student at Brown, played one game for the Providence Grays of the National League in 1879, hence technically breaking the color barrier.) Before a crowd of 26,623 spectators (of whom approximately 14,000 are thought to have been black), though he got no hits, Robinson scored a run to contribute to the Dodgers' 5-3 victory over the Boston Braves.... 

• SOURCE: TheRoot
  2-13-13
  

  How Do I Decode Slave Records?

  For many African Americans the paper trail back to your ancestral origins hits a wall once you reach the slavery era. During the hunt for information about my great-great grandmother, Jane Gates, who was born into slavery in 1819, we were able to find her in the 1870 census, the oldest census to list all African Americans by name. Before then, few counties listed slaves by name, so we shifted gears and searched the "slave schedules" for the 1860 and 1850 census information for slave owners named Gates. However, we weren't able to find anyone under that name who owned a slave that was around her age. This means that she was owned by someone with a surname other than Gates, and the only way to find her by using records would be to undertake a systematic search of the estate papers, wills and tax records, and other documents of every slave holder in Allegany County, Md....