by Gavin Wright | Narratives, Season 2
African Americans couldn’t seize much universal freedom as the brick-and-mortar of Jim Crow walled them off from their rights. Still, race men and women fought. Following the death of three friends, instigated by the white press, Ida B. Wells committed herself to...
by Gavin Wright | Narratives, Season 2
Attendees of the 1914 “Fifty Years of Negro Health Improvement in Preparation for Efficiency” conference, with speakers including Booker T. Washington, heard staggering information about the Black population’s “health”, which was in crisis. Life expectancy for African...
by Gavin Wright | Narratives, Season 2
Black workers were expected to take on “respectable” employment in the early twentieth century, essentially a racist dog whistle to keep them in the dirtiest, most dangerous and low-paying jobs. While some Black people had the means to reject these types of jobs, most...
by Gavin Wright | Narratives, Season 2
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, several million African Americans left the South for the North and West. They wanted to raise their kids in a place where they could live and work undisturbed by violence and out from under a racist social order. And...
by Gavin Wright | Narratives, Season 2
Many Black Americans at the end of the nineteenth century relied heavily on themselves, prioritizing self-determination and securing their collective destiny through solidarity, self-help, and economic independence. But blatant racism saturated media, entertainment,...
by Gavin Wright | Narratives, Season 2
With white supremacist strategies for segregated societies solidifying in towns across America’s South, Black people needed to respond in ways that would ensure the freedoms their predecessors had fought to codify into law remained available to them. Between 1900 and...
by Gavin Wright | Narratives, Season 2
The 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago was an opportunity for the United States to showcase its spectacular growth and signal its arrival as a world power, but it failed to highlight Black Americans’ role in its development, and they took notice. So when Paris hosted the...
by Gavin Wright | Narratives, Season 2
At the turn of the 20th century, Black southerners and their allies were in something of a holding pattern. They were experiencing the brick and mortar of Jim Crow, walling them off from their rights and liberty, being installed in real time. Racial terror killings...
