African-American Archives - Public Seminar

Literature

Excerpt from “A Rising Tide Lifts all Boats: Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects”

“Hers is the story, if ever there was one, of a great American”

September 7, 2022 • by Dwight A. McBride

The story of Poems on Various Subjects, like the story of its author, the slave girl named after the ship that brought her across the Atlantic, is a story that should both inspire and enrage. ...

The Hidden Structural Racism in the American Response to Public Health Emergencies

Facing a disproportionate death rate among Black people from COVID-19, President Trump shrugs: “What, me, worry?”

July 23, 2020 • by R. Drew Smith

When faced with emerging epidemics related to HIV/AIDS in the 1970s, to crack cocaine in the 1980s, to Ebola in 2014 and 2018, the U.S. government was slow to intervene on behalf of homosexual populations, or urban poor populations, or African populations, who respectively were most-affected by those public health ...

Hope, Revolution, and Survival

An interview with Morgan Parker

May 11, 2020 • by Masha Shollar and Morgan Parker

Masha Shollar [MS]: You’ve said that you trick yourself into writing by making yourself laugh. This collection is so intense and not one I would automatically think of as humorous, even though poems like “Matt” and “Brooklyn” for instance are, in ways, very funny. But they still had these dark ...