The post As Wildfire Smoke Chokes the Northeast Again, Black Communities Are at Risk appeared first on America's Black Holocaust Museum.
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On Wednesday, New York City ranked among the most polluted cities in the world. By Thursday, Gov. Kathy Hochul expanded a statewide Air Quality Health Advisory, warning that levels across New York City, Long Island, and Western New York could begin to cause adverse health effects on people. The most intense smoke is forecast to push as far south as Washington, D.C.
For Black communities across the Midwest and Northeast, the scene is familiar. Black communities already shoulder a disproportionate burden of air pollution, asthma, and respiratory disease, which makes these smoke events land even harder. Some of the worst hit places so far include Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, and Milwaukee.
A recent study found that Black adults and those living in higher-poverty census tracts faced the strongest mortality effects from cumulative wildfire smoke exposure. Wildfire smoke, researchers at Stanford University have noted, is “10 times as toxic” as typical air pollution.
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]]>The post Civil rights leaders announce ‘March on Washington’ to defend voting rights appeared first on America's Black Holocaust Museum.
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CHICAGO — Civil rights leaders announced plans for a Washington march to defend voting rights, saying Tuesday that recent court decisions have weakened key federal protectio9ns against racial discrimination in voting.
The coalition — led by the Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network and joined by Martin Luther King III, Arndrea Waters King and labor and civil rights groups — will host the “March on Washington 2026: Defend the Vote” march on Aug. 28.
That will mark the 63rd anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
Organizers said they hope to use the event to pressure lawmakers and rally a response to the erosion of voting protections.
The campaign centers on the Supreme Court’s April ruling weakening Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, a key provision used to challenge voting laws and electoral maps that discriminate on the basis of race or dilute minority voting power.
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]]>The post Slavery exhibit swapped overnight at Philadelphia’s Independence Park appeared first on America's Black Holocaust Museum.
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The Trump administration has replaced an exhibit on slavery at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia with a version that advocates say sanitizes the nation’s history.
The President’s House site at the park includes an excavation of the home where George Washington lived when he served as president, with surrounding panel displays and videos focused heavily on the stories of nine enslaved people who lived with and served him.
Michael Coard, a founding member of the local advocacy group the Avenging the Ancestors Coalition, said the new panels whitewash history by taking out panels previously in the exhibit, such as one titled “The Dirty Business of Slavery.”
“It’s not going to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” Coard said of the new panels.
In a statement, Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle L. Parker said the previous panels were removed overnight.
“Overnight, under the cover of darkness, the federal government removed panels at the President’s House that told a thorough history of Philadelphia,” Parker said. “That it did so at night shows it understands this action is shameful, that it violates community trust.”
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]]>The post Caribbean leaders press for slavery reparations, end of islands’ territorial status appeared first on America's Black Holocaust Museum.
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SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — A group of Caribbean leaders met with senior clergy from the Church of England on Tuesday as the push for slavery reparations intensifies, with activists also calling for the independence of British, French, Dutch and U.S. territories in the region.
The reparations commission from Caricom, a Caribbean trade bloc, was scheduled to also meet with British parliamentarians as part of a four-day official trip to the United Kingdom to seek reparations, the second such trip since November.
The group said the commission is creating a framework to launch negotiations because the time for making the case for reparatory justice is overdue.
“We in the Caribbean remain the most colonized part of the world, and this has to stop,” said Hilary Beckles, chairman of Caricom’s reparations commission and vice chancellor of the University of the West Indies.
Earlier this year, France acknowledged the need for reparations.
We cover more reperations stories in our breaking news.
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]]>The post The Lindsey Graham Remembered by Black America appeared first on America's Black Holocaust Museum.
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Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) died July 11, 2026, at age 71, after what his office described as a brief and sudden illness. The three-decade Republican fixture in Washington is being remembered by allies as a fighter and a patriot. But behind the tributes lies a three-decade record on race that civil rights organizations, Black voters, and his own public statements paint as far more complicated than the send-off suggests.
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]]>The post Black America Is Already In A Recession appeared first on America's Black Holocaust Museum.
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The revelation that the U.S. economy shed 92,000 jobs in February and now faces its highest unemployment rate in years has rattled economists, many of whom warn that the country may be on the brink of a recession.
For Black America, the recession has already arrived.333
Even worse, the Black recession isn’t driven natural market cycles alone. It is the pre3dictable outcome of the deliberate policy choices of the Trump administration —choices that have aggressively dismantled the very protections meant to advance equity and stabilize communities historically shut out of opportunity. Not only did the administration take a sledgehammer to federal diversity, equity, and inclusion programs on Day One, it has spent the last year slashing agencies that have long served as engines of mobility for Black workers, including the federal civil service. More than 327,000 federal jobs have been eliminated, not through attrition or organizational modernization, but through deliberate cuts that have eroded pathways to the middle class built through generations of civil‑rights gains.
At the same time, the administration has abandoned federal support for disadvantaged businesses. Critical institutions—among them the Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) Fund and the Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA)—have been targeted for defunding or dismantling altogether. These programs have been lifelines, offering capital and technical assistance to Black entrepreneurs who face entrenched discrimination from traditional lenders. Removing them does not create a level playing field; it cements an unequal one.
The consequences are measurable and immediate. After reaching an all-time low during the Biden administration, the Black unemployment rate surged to 8.3% by November 2025 — the highest level since the pandemic — and remains more than twice the rate for white Americans. The Black homeownership rate fell to 43.9% in the first half of 2025, wiping out years of fragile progress and deepening a racial wealth gap that already stood among the most persistent in the country.
Even before the latest dismal jobs report, the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies had already declared 2025 “a regression and recession” for Black Americans.
Discover other issues faced by the Black community in the modern world.
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]]>The post MSU project helps connect Black Americans to their ancestors appeared first on America's Black Holocaust Museum.
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Walter Hawthorne, an MSU history professor and co-director of Enslaved.org, became interested in digital history and platforms that could bring the study of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade to the public eye. So, he launched a website that helps connect Black Americans to their ancestors in 2020.
Before the creation of Enslaved.org, a team of scholars at Matrix and others at other universities launched an earlier project called Slave Biographies, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in 2011. The website published datasets and spreadsheets containing information about named enslaved individuals, made public through Matrix.
“Michigan State University really offered an ideal place to have a project, any digital project, but particularly a project about enslaved people,” Hawthorne said.
MSU has a digital humanities and social science center with a team of experts, system administrators, programmers, project managers and scholars of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade. Hawthorne said that without the College of Social Science’s support for Matrix and the broad support MSU provides, this project could never have taken place.
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The website’s significance lies in documenting named enslaved individuals whose stories have never been told because their information is fragmented and scattered across archives in many parts of the U.S. The website’s purpose is to move the historical lens of analysis away from enslavers to named enslaved individuals whose stories have never been told before.
Learn how researchers identify people not listed in censuses and about the risk of funding cuts.
Discover how DNA testing is helping people uncover their pasts.
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]]>The post ‘He saw signs saying No Blacks – but he never got bitter’: Sterling Betancourt, the man who brought steelpan music to the UK appeared first on America's Black Holocaust Museum.
]]>Moving to the UK in the 1950s, the Trinidadian musician endured racism and built his own instruments from waste. After his death aged 96, his widow recalls his patience and positivity
Wearing rusty steelpans hewn from oil drums around their necks, Sterling Betancourt and his 10 bandmates faced a sceptical crowd as they stood outside the recently opened Royal Festival Hall in London in 1951. Jokes about “black magic” were heard. Then they began striking their pans with mallets and those watching were stunned by the beautiful music that emanated.
The Trinidadian musicians were playing at the Festival of Britain – the government-funded jamboree celebrating British and Commonwealth cultural excellence as the country shook off the trauma of war – and that day they introduced a mellifluous style of music to the UK that has since been passed down from generation to generation. When Betancourt died on 3 June, aged 96, there was little fanfare. As a musician, he was never “famous” in the sense of having hit records or headlining festivals. Yet this warm, humble nonagenarian – and MBE recipient – was among the last of the Windrush-era musicians who changed the DNA of British music. Later this month, his steelpan music will return to the Royal Festival Hall for Steel Scenes, a festival marking the 75th anniversary of the Trinidad All-Steel Percussion Orchestra (Taspo), the group he played with in 1951.
After wowing the Festival of Britain, Taspo undertook an extensive UK tour, performed on BBC TV and began a residency in Paris where they made Europe’s first commercially released steelpan band recordings. All the members of Taspo then headed back to Trinidad later that year – except Betancourt, who remained in London, building his own instruments from oil drums discarded in the city’s waste grounds.
He initially struggled to interest the public in pan. “He was quite distraught,” recalls his widow Beatrice, saying he had to learn jazz drumming to make a living. But he was no quitter[.]
Learn more about Betancourt.
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]]>The post George E. Johnson, founder of pioneering Black hair products company, dies at 99 appeared first on America's Black Holocaust Museum.
]]>The Johnson Products Company was founded in 1954, catering to African Americans’ evolving tastes in hairstyles and fashion, in an era when U.S. companies paid little attention to Black consumers.
George E. Johnson, the pioneering Chicago entrepreneur whose eponymous company transformed Black hair care in the U.S. with brands including Afro Sheen, Ultra Wave and Classy Curl, died on Monday at age 99, according to news media reports.
Johnson, who was born in a sharecropper’s shack in Mississippi and moved to Chicago with his mother at age 2, died at his downtown Chicago condo of natural causes, the Chicago Sun-Times reported, citing his son, John Edward Johnson.
The New York Times, citing his second wife, Madeline Murphy Rabb, reported that Johnson died of a respiratory illness.
The Johnson Products Company was founded in 1954, catering to African Americans’ evolving tastes in hairstyles, fashion and cosmetics in an era when U.S. companies and advertisers paid little attention to Black consumers.
The business, which Johnson co-founded with his first wife, Joan Johnson, who died in 2019, grew to command nearly 80% of the Black hair care market by 1960, and in 1971 became the first Black-owned company listed on the American Stock Exchange, now known as NYSE American.
Learn more about the company and the man behind it.
Madam C. J. Walker was a similar trailblazing entrepreneur.
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]]>The post ‘Share the story’: Gravesite believed to belong to one of the oldest free Black persons in America restored in Boston appeared first on America's Black Holocaust Museum.
]]>Mayor Michelle Wu called for a deeper look into American history after the discovery and marked the moment during the city’s July 4 festivities.
In light of America’s 250th birthday on Saturday, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu revealed that conservators at the city’s historic Granary Burying Ground discovered what is believed to be one of the oldest headstones belonging to a free Black man in America.
“That discovery is likely one of the oldest gravestones of a free Black person in America,” Wu said around the 13-minute mark of her speech at Faneuil Hall. “It’s been there all along. We just had to go look and share the story.”
In June, city archaeologists used a 251-year-old map to locate a Revolutionary War fort built on the eve of the Battle of Bunker Hill, according to Wu, who referenced the work in her commemorative speech. The trench where the gravestone was discovered was located, along with musket balls and gun flints from the battle, one of the earliest battles of the war for independence from England.
The gravesite was identified as belonging to a man named Sebastian Lake, a former slave who died free in 1729. The site is set to be among 40 new historical markers placed around the city to highlight Boston’s hidden history, including sites where students walked out in protest of segregation.
See the mayor’s comments below:
There has been a long fight to preserve Black burial grounds.
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