NPR

Brittni Robertson Powell, with the New Orleans-based bookstore Baldwin & Co. looks through her choice for Black History Month: I Am Ruby Bridges. Aubri Juhasz /Aubri Juhasz Each February, the U.S. honors the contributions and sacrifices of African Americans who have shaped the nation. If you're struggling with the best way to educate children about Black history, this month or year-round, experts often suggest turning to literature to assist. Books […]

Crownsville patients work in the hospital's fields in the 1910s. Maryland State Archives/Hatchette From the outside, the Hospital for the Negro Insane of Maryland, which opened in Crownsville, Md., in 1911, looked like a farm, with patients harvesting tobacco, constructing gardens and working with cattle. But Peabody award-winning NBC journalist Antonia Hylton says the hospital's interior told a different story. Inside, Crownsville Hospital, as it became known, had cold, concrete […]

Dr. Uché Blackstock is the author of Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons With Racism In Medicine. Diane Zhao/Penguin Random House When Dr. Uché Blackstock was a medical student at Harvard, she had a near-death experience that gave her a sobering outlook on the state of medical care in the U.S. Suffering from excruciating stomach pain, Blackstock took herself to the E.R., where, after hours of waiting, she was told she […]

The Montgomery bus boycott lasted from December of 1955 through December of 1956. What people often remember of that moment in history is that when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat, it sparked a bus boycott that was led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But what that retelling leaves out are all the women who organized for years to make that boycott a reality and who helped […]

The U.S. Mint has released the 2024 Harriet Tubman Silver Dollar as part of the Harriet Tubman Commemorative Coin Program. The coins include $5 gold coins, $1 silver coins and half-dollar coins honoring the bicentennial of her birth. U.S. Mint Three commemorative coins featuring famed abolitionist and human rights activist Harriet Tubman have now been released to the public, the U.S. Mint said. The coins, which were released Thursday as […]

Jeffrey Wright stars as Thelonious "Monk" Ellison in American Fiction. Claire Folger/Orion Releasing LLC In the satirical film American Fiction, a frustrated writer named Thelonious "Monk" Ellison (played by Jeffrey Wright) can't get his latest book published because editors say it's not "Black" enough. Monk's editors want clichéd stories about Black life — something screenwriter and director Cord Jefferson says he experienced first-hand as a writer in Hollywood. "People would […]