Celebrating the Silver Jubilee of the Tuskegee Institute in Four Photographs
Pittsburgh’s segregated Hill District became a hub of jazz and Black culture. Charles “Teenie” Harris, the renowned photographer and chronicler of Black life, captured it all.
The influence of writer and musician Gil Scott-Heron is widely felt. However, assessing his legacy involves figuring out just what kind of artist he was.
In his last and least known book, James Baldwin demonstrates how the Atlanta Child Murders were not an aberration but rather evidence of the failures of integration, the growing divide between the Black poor and the middle classes, and the need to claim the dead as our own.
Writer and director Oscar Micheaux was a creative entrepreneur and one of the most important figures in African American cinema during the early twentieth century.
The editorial team at Picturing Black History recognizes the importance of Black history as a subject of academic knowledge and a source of African diaspora identities. We embrace the power of images to capture stories of oppression and resistance, perseverance and resilience, freedom dreams, imagination, and joy within the United States and around the globe.
Picturing Black History emerged in the wake of national and international Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd at the hands of four Minneapolis police officers in 2020. We recognize that Black Lives Matter is a contemporary outgrowth of a long history of Black racial protest in the United States. Picturing Black History is our collaborative effort to contribute to an ongoing public dialogue on the significance of Black history and Black life in the United States and throughout the globe.