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African American History

While Austin is the Live Music Capital of the World, its big sister, Houston, is the historic heart of Texas music. For decades, amateur blues and jazz musicians went to Houston to make it big, and established...
It may surprise you to know that the basis for Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin was not only social commentary. There is a real person underpinning the tale: Josiah Henson.
In 2018 the Frederick Douglass Bicentennial Commemoration placed 13 statues around the city of Rochester, NY to commemorate Frederick Douglass's 200th birthday. On the anniversary of one of his famous speeches, one of those 13 statues was torn down. On July 16,...
In 1619 -- a date that the New York Times has recently made famous and essential--a group of 32 African men, women, and children arrived on the shores of Virginia. They had been kidnapped in the royal...
Your history books may have covered notable African-American trailblazers like Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Harriet Tubman but Black history expands much further. So, we’ve put together a list of little-known but significant heroes in...
Although President Abraham Lincoln had issued a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862 (after the Battle of Antietam), and the final proclamation on January 1, 1863 (the same day as the Battle of Galveston), they actually had a minimal immediate impact on the lives of most of the millions of the nation’s enslaved African Americans, especially the slaves in Texas.

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