By Clifton R. Wharton, Jr.
The unprecedented election of President Barack Obama has provided a dramatic spotlight on the issues of race in America. One aspect of significance is that it represents an important step in the process of racial integration in our nation. His election was the result of the collective decisions by a multi racial and multi ethnic electorate. Both as a U.S. Senator from Illinois and as President, Obama has been what might be called an “Integrative Black Pioneer.”

By Leslie Proll
When President Obama took office last January, hopes were high that the right wing’s long stronghold on the federal courts had come to an end. LDF and other civil rights advocates were eager for a new day when fair and impartial judges would once again be nominated and confirmed in large numbers.

By Lee A. Daniels
July’s importance to African-American history underscores the fullness of the history of African Americans in and of itself. It also underscores how profoundly intertwined that history is — right down to the present moment — with the forces and ideals which led to and flowed from the actions of the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776.

By Lee A. Daniels
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when white women, regardless of their wealth or social position, could not vote, and were widely discouraged from pursuing any meaningful work outside the home, Belle da Costa Greene achieved extraordinary success: as a chief advisor to J.P. Morgan, one of America’s greatest titans.

By David Levering Lewis
February is the month of America’s emancipators. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, emancipator of African-American citizenship, was born February 23, 1868. Du Bois’s eloquent turn-of-the-century meditation, The Souls of Black Folk, explained Americans of color to themselves with a saliency that still inspires and defines them today.

By Stacey Patton
African-American history has allowed both blacks, whites, and other groups to come to know themselves in a more nuanced and truthful way even amidst denial. And yet, there are writers, some of them African American, calling for black history to fade to black – no pun intended – for good.

By Stacey Patton
“Oil Made Pickaninny Rich – Oklahoma Girl With $15,000 A Month Gets Many Proposals – Four White Men in Germany Want to Marry the Negro Child That They Might Share Her Fortune,” which appeared in The Kansas City Star on January 15, 1914, was just the first of many newspaper and magazine headlines during the next decade about Sarah Rector, the richest black child known to the world in that era.

By Lee A. Daniels
Born into dire poverty, the son of hard-working, achievement-oriented ex-slaves, Johnson rose against the seemingly insurmountable barriers of the pervasive, fierce racism of the day to capture an exalted symbol of the sports world-and of white supremacy-the world heavyweight boxing championship.

By The Editors
The February tribute known as Black History Month began in 1926 as Negro History Week, created by Dr. Carter G. Woodson, a distinguished scholar who was determined to counteract the deliberate omissions of and distortions about black Americans’ history found in most school history textbooks.