Posts by Ben Dawson

  • Dark Enough to See the Stars

    The night before he was assassinated, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his prophetic final speech, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” in Memphis, Tennessee. It was a speech he almost didn’t give.

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  • Revisiting an American Prayer

    As Women’s History Month draws to a close, there’s been one more broad attack on methods of sharing our nation’s history: on March 27, President Donald Trump issued a new executive order affecting the 21 museums and 14 education and research centers that are part of the Smithsonian Institution, including the American Women’s History Museum, which is still years away from breaking ground on its official site, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the National Zoo.

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  • “Everyone Is Welcome”

    An Idaho middle school teacher recently made headlines for refusing to take down a classroom poster she said she was told was “controversial” and “an opinion.”

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  • Women’s History: Vision and Light

    Forty-five years ago, President Jimmy Carter issued the first presidential proclamation designating March 2-8, 1980, as National Women’s History Week.

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  • Remembering Selma

    Sixty years ago, on Sunday, March 7, 1965, John Lewis and Reverend Hosea Williams set out on a nonviolent march with a group of 600 men, women, young people, and children headed from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital in Montgomery.

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  • Dr. Alvin Poussaint

    Harvard Medical School scholar Dr. Alvin Poussaint, who passed away February 24, was a renowned psychiatrist and educator whose research included studying the ways racism and discrimination impact African Americans’ self-esteem and mental health, including Black children and young people.

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  • Examples to Embrace

    As a child, the great theologian Howard Thurman treasured spending time alone under a beloved oak tree in his yard: “I could sit my back against its trunk, and feel the same peace that would come to me in my bed at night.

  • Teaching Black History

    Dr. Carter G. Woodson, “the Father of Black History,” was born in Virginia in 1875 to parents who had both formerly been enslaved. When his family moved to Huntington, West Virginia, they were close to Frederick Douglass High School, one of the rare high schools open for Black students, but he remained largely self-taught while working in the local coal mines to help support his family first.

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  • Black Workers, Black History

    Every February, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), the organization established in 1915 by “the Founder of Black History” Dr. Carter G. Woodson, designates a theme for the observance of Black History Month.

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  • Writing the Next Chapter

    In the days following President Barack Obama’s first inauguration, the preparations for Black History Month felt especially joyful. That was a moment when the entire nation could see Black history and American history being written at the same time.

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