In The News #Big Isms #OneDropRule #RedLining #GreatMigration

 These are amazing stories. Hope you enjoy!

 

She sued her enslaver for reparations and won. Her descendants never knew.
Sydney Trent, February 24, 2021, The Washington Post


Not long after his mother died on an October day in 2003, David Blackman journeyed with his teenage daughter from Pensacola, Fla., to the narrow, two-story brick house in Southside Chicago where he had lived as a boy.

Mary Blackman’s home had once throbbed with life — the notes as she played the piano ringing through the rooms, the smell of biscuits and fudge filling the air and, not infrequently, the stern thunder of Mary’s voice as she kept her six children in line.

Now the house was eerily quiet, jammed with furniture, stacks of papers and puzzles, dusty knickknacks. As David sifted through items on an old wooden sideboard in Mary’s dining room, a sheaf of papers caught his eye. He picked them up and scanned them: They were photocopies of a one-page contract written in a very old-fashioned, angular black script. David had difficulty making out what it said, let alone its import, but two words stood out: “Henrietta Wood.”

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How Black people in the 19th century used photography as a tool for social change
Samantha Hill, February 26, 2021, The Conversation


Frederick Douglass is perhaps best known as an abolitionist and intellectual. But he was also the most photographed American of the 19th century. And he encouraged the use of photography to promote social change for Black equality.

In that spirit, this article – using images from the David V. Tinder Collection of Michigan Photography at the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan – examines different ways Black Americans from the 19th century used photography as a tool for self-empowerment and social change.

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West Hartford is mostly white, while Bloomfield is largely Black; how that came to be tells the story of racism and segregation in American suburbs
Alex Putterman, February 19, 2021, Hartford Courant


For more than two years, homeowners in one West Hartford neighborhood rallied fervently against a proposal for multifamily housing they say would change their community.

The fight began in 2018, when 181 residents signed a petition opposing the development, which had been proposed for the corner of New Britain Avenue and Berkshire Road. It continued last fall, with residents again seeking to block a zoning change that would enable the housing to move forward.

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How the Underground Railroad Succeeded Thanks to Lack of Immigration Law
Mansoor Tanweer, February 10, 2021, New Canadian Media


The Underground Railroad is often in the spotlight during Black History Month, but there is one little-discussed aspect that allowed the railroad to function and enabled Thornton Blackburn, his wife Lucie, and many other Black slaves to seek refuge in Canada: the fact that the country did not have a formal immigration law until 1869.

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How the “One Drop Rule” Became a Tool of White Supremacy
Yaba Blay, February 22, 2021, Literary Hub


The US Census reveals much about the country’s perspective on race. It counts people according to how the nation defines people, and historically, those people counted as Black have been those people with any known Black ancestry. Blacks are defined by the one-drop rule. No other racial or ethnic group is defined in this way, nor does any other nation rely upon this formula; the one-drop rule is definitively Black and characteristically American. It should make sense then that the origins of the rule are directly linked to the history of Black people in the United States, and as such, our discussion of the one-drop rule begins during the period of colonial enslavement.

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Migration Meals: How African American Food Transformed the Taste of America
Jessica B. Harris, February 08, 2021, Eating Well


Between the end of Reconstruction — which lasted from the Emancipation Proclamation until 1877 — and the latter half of the 20th century, an estimated 5 million-plus African Americans moved out of the rural South to the Northeast, Midwest and West. The statistics and history are stark but the cultural transformation that took place, known as the Great Migration, propelled the African American world front and center in American culture in ways that are broadly felt. With the Great Migration, the Delta blues morphed into the Chicago blues, then rhythm and blues and then rock and roll. Barbecue went on the move and became nationally known, and sweet potato pies came to sit on Thanksgiving tables in the North as well as the South. With the Great Migration, African American culture transformed American culture and the country began to know, eat and love African American foods, many of which originated in the South.

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