African-American History

The Special Collections Research Center of the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, has partnered with several Black churches in Williamsburg to add their church records to the library’s special collections. One is the First Baptist Church, one of the country’s earliest African-American congregations that was founded by free and enslaved African Americans in 1776.

Of the 10.7 million Africans who survived the Middle Passage, 4.9 million were taken to Brazil, another 1 million arrived in Jamaica, and millions more were taken to various islands in the Caribbean. A new collaboration between Harvard University, the University of Pittsburgh and four universities in Latin America will study slavery throughout the Western Hemisphere.

The School of Education and the Graduate School will be renamed to honor African Americans students who broke racial barriers at the university. The Design Building is being renamed for the university's first Black professor.

During the Great Depression, Ann Rice O’Hanlon painted a 38 feet wide, 11 feet tall mural on Kentucky history in the University of Kentucky’s Memorial Hall. The mural depicted enslaved African Americans hunched in a field, Black musicians playing for White dancers, and a Native American threatening a White settler with a tomahawk.

Syracuse University Libraries’ Special Collections Research Center has announced that it has acquired the African Market Literature Collection and the papers of Masood Ali-Wilbert Warren, a Black American painter, sculptor, and Korean war Army veteran.

The Reconciliation Fund has begun accepting applications for projects that aim to benefit communities of the descendants of people enslaved and sold by the university, many of whom live in and around Maringouin, Louisiana, where their ancestors were sold and forcibly moved to in 1838. The university plans to allocate $400,000 annually to the effort.

The collection aims to grant free non-commercial access to rarely seen historical and cultural images of the African/Black Diaspora in the United States and the United Kingdom from the nineteenth century to the present day to educators, academics, researchers, and content creators.

A new public database of African American students created by the University of Michigan documents students who attended the university between 1817 and as recently as 1970. The database contains information on nearly 6,000 African American students.

Charles McMicken left a bequest of real estate to the City of Cincinnati that led to the founding in 1870 of the University of Cincinnati. McMicken traded in enslaved persons and fathered two children with enslaved women.

Zella Powell is believed to be the university’s first Black graduate, earning a degree from Eastern State Normal School in 1910. Ona Norton was the matriarch of a Black family in Charleston, Illinois, who housed Black student athletes in the 1950s who were not permitted to live on campus.