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Five Decades of Black Activism in St. Louis
A 2015 panel discussion moderated by Professor Elizabeth Hinton at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University looked at the movement for racial equity in St....
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Shirley Chisholm: Sisterhood Is Complicated
Shirley Chisholm (1924–2005), the daughter of Caribbean immigrants to the United States, planted the seeds for her historic career in politics as an educator in Brooklyn, New York, in the 1950s. After...
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Kimberlé Crenshaw’s Intersectional Feminism
Legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” in 1989 to describe how systems of oppression overlap to create distinct experiences for people with multiple identity categories....
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Rare 1969 Story from The Queen’s Gambit Author Walter Tevis
In Walter Tevis’s short story entitled “The Scholar’s Disciple,” the protagonist—a graduate student known only as Webley—conjures the devil in his apartment. As the devil stands awkwardly before him...
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Verbatim: Jonas Salk
One of the most important virologists in history, Jonas Salk (1914–1995) was a leader in developing the first effective vaccine for polio, introduced in 1955. Polio is an infectious disease, often...
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Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) was a Black American anthropologist, folklorist, and author. After studying with Franz Boas at Barnard College, she became a leading light of the Harlem Renaissance. She...
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Reginald Dwayne Betts
In 2012, the poet Reginald Dwayne Betts wrote an essay for the American Poetry Review about fellow poet Etheridge Knight that’s deeply resonant today. Here’s an excerpt. You can read and download the...
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Ten Poems by Audre Lorde
jessehelms “I am a Black woman writing my way to the future” Berlin is Hard on Colored Girls “Perhaps a strange woman walks down from the corner into my bedroom wasps nest behind her ears she is eating...
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bell hooks
The Black feminist theorist and activist bell hooks has died. Here’s a small selection of her work to read for free on JSTOR. “Talking Back” from Discourse “This emphasis on woman’s silence may be an...
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Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
On October 20, 1931, Mohandas Karachand Gandhi, already referred to with the honorific “Mahatma,” or Great Soul, stood before an audience at London’s Chatham House to share his view on the future of...
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Alexander Calder, Sculptor
American sculptor Alexander Calder was born on this day in 1898. Celebrated for his abstract kinetic sculptures and his monumental public sculptures, Calder, together with minimalist artists such as...
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Thurgood Marshall
On August 30, 1967, Thurgood Marshall became the first Black American to be confirmed as United States Supreme Court Justice. He brought to the bench an already stellar legal and political career. As a...
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Verbatim: Fredric Jameson
Literary critic, critical theorist, philosopher, Marxist: Fredric Jameson died last month at the age of ninety. In his long career, he wrote more than thirty books and many more articles on literature,...
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