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Rare Images of Black History: A Timeline
How do you tell the entire story of the black experience in America? Life Upon These Shores: Looking at African American History, 1513-2008, by The Root’s editor-in-chief, Henry Louis Gates Jr., dares to capture its scope and breadth, from the era of 16th-century conquistadors to ascendance of 21st-century politicians. This exclusive slideshow includes a fraction…
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Revealing Roots: Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot
Sandy Harris chose to fight for the freedom of other blacks. And this sense of service became a leitmotif in Lawrence-Lightfoot’s family. People who could have passed didn’t pass. People who could have stayed in the North instead headed South to work in impoverished communities. It’s a structuring principle of Lawrence-Lightfoot’s ancestry. Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot is…
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Dominicans in Denial
How do race and racism play themselves out in the Caribbean? To see for myself, I boarded a fight to the Dominican Republic, on the island of Hispaniola — which it shares, somewhat uneasily, with Haiti. The people here, on opposite sides of this island, have faced each other across this body of land for…
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Ben Carson Finds Rare Proof of African Ties
On the Ash side, we had been able to trace his oldest ancestor to a birth before the Revolutionary War, an extraordinary accomplishment for a black person who was not freed before the Civil War. On the Copeland side, we went back well into the early 19th century. Benjamin Solomon Carson was born on Sept.…
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Behind The Root's New Look
Dear Readers of The Root, Let me take this opportunity to tell you how excited I am about our home page redesign, which launched on July 21. Over the past three years, we have worked hard to make The Root the premier news and information site with an African-American perspective. The amount of quality content…
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Revealing Roots: Maya Angelou Breaks the Silence
We are fascinated by slavery today. And it’s not a minute too soon. We see what has happened. We know that she who does not know where she has come from cannot possibly guide a path to where she has to go. Maya Angelou was born April 4, 1928, in St. Louis. Her birth name…
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Revealing Roots: Chris Rock Uncovers the Ancestral Source of His Drive
It’s amazing no one’s ever been persecuted for treating people like this — taking away their names, taking away everything. People just treat it like it was disco — or bell-bottoms. Just something that happened. Slavery. Christopher Julius Rock was born Feb. 7, 1965. He grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y. His mother, Rosalie Tingman, was…
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Don Cheadle's Deep American Roots
The Chickasaw people cannot see any reason or just cause why they should be required to do more for their freed slaves than the white people have done for theirs. It was by the example and teaching of the white man that we purchased at enormous prices their slaves and used their labor and was…
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'Black in Latin America': The Other African Americans
I first learned that there were black people living somewhere in the Western Hemisphere other than the United States when my father told me the first thing he had wanted to be when he grew up. When he was a boy about my age, he said, he wanted to be an Episcopal priest because he…
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W.E.B. Du Bois' Talented Tenth in Pictures
Visitors to the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900 were introduced to escalators, pictorial panoramas, the Paris Metro and the first films with sound. They also encountered — in a section of the vast world’s fair aptly titled exposé nègre, or Negro exposition — an unusual photo exhibit: hundreds of images of black professionals and…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
