African-American History

Learn about African American history with these old magazine articles. Find information on Black Civil Rights violations in the 1920s.

Brough Called Out for Racial Parity
(New York Times, 1915)

One year prior to being elected as the 25th governor of Arkansas, Charles Hillman Brough (1876 – 1935), while serving as the chairman of the University Commission on the Southern Race Question, submitted his opinion regarding racial segregation in the Annual Report that he had written for that organization. Dr. Brough, who at the time was a professor of Economics and Sociology at the University of Arkansas, condemned the Jim Crow laws that had separated Whites from Blacks, believing that no good could ever spring from it:

In my humble opinion, it is better to admit the negro to all the stimulus and the inspiration of the white’s social heritage, so far as it applies to economic equality of opportunity given through industrial education, in so far as it does not endanger the integrity of the social heritage itself, than to encourage an ignorant and debased citizenship by his neglect and repression.

What the Negro Thinks
(The Bookman, 1929)

This is the 1929 book review of What the Negro Thinksstyle=border:none
by Robert Moton (1867 – 1940).

[To the Negro] the white man sometimes seems a bit pathetic in his insistence upon keeping the worth of the Negro hidden, in refusing to recognize skill and talent, honor and virtue, strength and goodness simply because it wears a black skin. To him, the white man’s apparent dread of the Negro is incomprehensible…

The Bible and Slavery
(The North American Review, 1864)

This is a book review written during the American Civil War of a British work titled, Does the Bible Sanction American Slavery by a well known anti-imperialist of the time named Goldwin Smith (1823-1910).

Is African slavery, as it exists in our Southern states, an evil or a good thing? Is it, or is it not, consistent with a high sense of duty to man and to God, and with the requirements of that state of Christian civilization which the foremost nations of the world have reached?

The second part of the article is available upon request.

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