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Steven Cromack Contrary to popular belief, Jackie Robinson was not the first black man to play major league baseball. That title belongs to Moses Fleetwood Walker, who lived and played nearly eighty years before Robinson. Walker’s story is fascinating not only because of his baseball stardom, but also because an all white jury acquitted him of first-degree murder in 1891. Historians do not know much about his early years. Moses Fleetwood Walker was born in Ohio. A minister’s son, he entered Oberlin College and planned to become a lawyer. While at school, however, it became clear that his passion lay elsewhere. Instead of going to class, Walker played baseball, and in 1883 he landed a spot in the minor leagues as a catcher with newly formed Toledo Blue Stockings. As a player, he impressed the press and the fans. Sporting Life , the nation’s largest sport publication at the time, wrote on September 15, 1883: “Walker, the colored catcher of the Toledos, is a favorite wherever he goes. He ...

Aaron Astor In 1926 historian E. Merton Coulter described Kentucky during the Civil War as a “crouching lion, stretched east and west . . . the thoroughfare of the continent.” Kentucky served as more than the geographic fulcrum of the Union between slave and free states. It also represented the political heart of the Union, its politicians, most notably Henry Clay, having offered Union-saving compromise measures since 1820. It had long embraced conservative Unionism, a political tradition that understood “conservative” both as a social orientation (allowing for only gradual change to the institution of slavery) and a political relationship (with the Union buttressing the social order). Militarily, Kentucky was absolutely critical to the Federal war effort, as the Ohio River would have become an international boundary if Kentucky had joined the Confederacy. Further, tens of thousands of Indianans, Illinoisans, and Ohioans traced their roots to Kentucky, including President Lincoln himse...

Kevin M. Levin* [Crossposted from the Civil War Memory blog] Last week's post on the Civil War Memory blog about the unveiling of three plaques honoringVirginia’s post-Civil War black politicians has me thinking about my old buddy, William Mahone. While Mahone is best remembered as the “ Hero of the Crater ” his role in launching and leading the state’s most successful third-party political movement has largely been forgotten. In Virginia it was intentionally ignored because what came to be known as the Readjuster Party (1879-83) was bi-racial. The arc from Mahone’s role in preventing a Union breakthrough outside Petersburg that left scores of black Union soldiers massacred on the Crater battlefield to creating an opportunity for the largest number of black Virginians to vote, go to school and serve in positions of local and state government just a few short years later could not be more striking. Could anyone in 1865 anticipate that it would be a former Confederate general who...

The Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World Program (CLAW) at the College of Charleston in Charleston, South Carolina invites paper proposals addressing the transnational and transcultural impacts of music throughout the Atlantic World for a conference to be held March 7-9, 2014.  We are especially interested in twentieth and twenty-first century music and cultural exchange, but the conference is open to any work that examines the movement of music in the Atlantic World from the 1600s to the present. We welcome a broad range of submissions, but especially encourage submissions that utilize an interdisciplinary approach.  Proposals may address any area of music in the Atlantic World. We invite scholars to submit proposals for individual papers and panels that address such questions as: * Tradition and modernity in popular and indigenous music in Latin America, the Caribbean and West Africa * Music, Race, and Empire * Jazz in a global context * Trans-Caribbean identities in Salsa...

NPR Staff, "The Voting Rights Act: Hard-Won Gains, An Uncertain Future," NPR, July 21, 2013 . . . . Congress also noted, however, that the Voting Rights Act was still needed, and it had Fort Scott, Kansas, Tribune , August 6, 1965, p. 1 From the Google News Archive . been used hundreds of times since 1982 to protect against discrimination. But in his opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts suggested it is a new era. "Our country has changed," he wrote for the majority. But Rep. Lewis says race is still very much at the forefront. "I think there has been a deliberate and systematic effort on the part of certain forces in our country to take the whole idea of race out of public policy," he says. "Race is involved in everything that makes up America, and we cannot escape it. We have to deal with it face on." >>> John Paul Stevens, "The Court & the Right to Vote: A Dissent," New York Review of Books , August 15, 2013 In Bending T...

Kevin Kenny* The word “diaspora” is remarkably popular. But what does it mean?  The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines diaspora as “The dispersion of Jews among the Gentile nations,” giving as a secondary definition “all those Jews who lived outside the biblical land of Israel.” A Harlem "Back to Africa" announcement, Negro Club, New York (1929). Courtesy of the New York Public Library. By this definition, diaspora is both a process (the scattering of Jewish populations) and a thing (their communities abroad). This double meaning is the source of much confusion. Until recently, diaspora referred almost exclusively to Jewish history. In the 19th and 20th centuries, many other groups—including people of African, Armenian, and Irish descent—adopted the term and molded it to their own purposes. As its illustrative example, the OED cites “[t]he famine, the diaspora and the long hatred of Irish Americans for Britain.” Today, diaspora is applied to virtually every group ...

Eric B. Schultz Ask an American historian to define the Great Migration and you’ll hear one of several answers.   Most will describe the movement of 6 million African Americans from the rural South who headed north and west, from A Jack Delano photo of migrants heading north from Florida, 1940. World War I through 1970, seeking economic opportunity and relief from Jim Crow laws. This is the story so beautifully told in Isabel Wilkerson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Warmth of Other Suns . There’s another group of historians who might describe the Great Migration as the 20,000 English men, women, and children who crossed the Atlantic between 1620 and 1640, seeking opportunity and relief in New England. These are the Mayflower names, the families that delight and provide such rich insights for genealogists.   Since 1988 the New England Historic Genealogical Society has sponsored the Great Migration Study Project , scheduled for completion in 2016. In his monumental What Ha...

Chris Beneke In a famous photograph of baseball star Jackie Robinson and Brooklyn Dodgers General Manager Branch Rickey, the African American legend prepares to sign his 1948 contract. As he does so, the viewer of this staged scene can make out a small photo hung above Rickey’s head at top right. From that modest rectangular frame, a young, beardless Abraham Lincoln gazes upon the scene.* Three years earlier, Robinson met Rickey under that same gaze and the two men discussed, among many other things, their shared Christian devotion. During this tense  and seemingly interminable meeting that would lead to the end of baseball’s longstanding prohibition on black players, Rickey had Robinson read a line from Giovanni Papini’s Life of Christ : “But whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.” Robinson agreed to turn the other cheek and in April 1947, he joined the Dodgers as the first African American major leaguer in more than half a century...

Heather Cox Richardson Claude McKay. Courtesy of the Beinecke Library, Yale University . Recently, I found myself telling history students which poems they must know as part of their rock-bottom basic understanding of American history. There is Anne Bradstreet’s “Epitaph for her Mother," exploring what it meant to be a good woman in colonial America; Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in theDooryard Bloom’d," linking Lincoln’s assassination to the natural world; and Claude McKay’s 1919 “If We Must Die."     If we must die—let it not be like hogs Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot, While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs, Making their mock at our accursed lot. If we must die—oh, let us nobly die, So that our precious blood may not be shed In vain; then even the monsters we defy Shall be constrained to honor us though dead! O kinsmen! We must meet the common foe! Though far outnumbered let us show us brave, And for their thousand blows deal one...