By Kenneth J. Cooper Brown University’s daring self-examination of its historical ties to slavery has prompted a second Ivy League school, venerable Harvard University, to do the same. The 2006 report that Brown President Ruth Simmons, “Slavery and Justice,”  commissioned found deep connections between the university in Providence, R.I. and slavery and the slave trade. [...]

By Lee A. Daniels
Imagine, in the heart of Dixie, once the land of cotton, where, to some whites, the old times of white-over-black dominion are not only not forgotten but wistfully remembered, there’s a park that’s a memorial to treason.

By Lee A. Daniels
Before the heat got too great. Before the criticism forced them to shelve – at least, momentarily – the moral-deadening posture of “Lost Cause romanticism.” Before somebody told them You can’t say things like that today and get away with it, the self-proclaimed Christian pressure group, the FAMiLY Leader, revealed that when it comes to black Americans, its “traditional” views are very old-fashioned indeed.

By Tarice L.S. Gray
Slavery as a topic needs no introduction to most Americans. But it does need an introduction to children; and how the facts of Negro Slavery in America has been taught to schoolchildren has often been as fraught with tension and controversy as other spheres what used to be know as “race relations.”

By Lee A. Daniels
Why is a symbol of a treasonous undertaking, led by men who betrayed their oaths as elected officials and military officers of the United States, still honored by those who claim to pledge allegiance to the United States of America?

By Janet Singleton
Canada too, the modest parallel universe above the United States, celebrated Black History Month in February. But that may surprise people who assume Canada is white and untouched by slavery.

By Lee A. Daniels
Two high profile events of this week underscore the wisdom of the warning the great historian Barbara W. Tuchman gave in 1982 to those who would “practice” the craft of writing history.

“Leaving things out because they do not fit,” she wrote in her book, Practicing History: Selected Essays, “is writing fiction, not history.”

By The Editors
On Friday, Virginia Gov. Robert F. McDonnell said he would declare April 2011 as “Civil War in Virginia Month” in keeping with the state’s effort to “remember [its] past with candor, courage and conciliation.” McDonnell’s designation last winter of April as “Confederate History Month” provoked an intense national controversy.

By Kenneth J. Cooper
Most people are astonished when I tell them the Cherokees owned slaves. Schools don’t teach about the slaveholding of the Cherokee and four other tribes who, most ironically, became known as the “Five Civilized Tribes.”

By Eisa Nefertari Ulen
I am walking the Bermuda’s African Diaspora Heritage Trail, and I am learning about Bermudians and other African Americans who, like me, are connected to this place.