African American History Is AMERICAN History

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1 day ago | [YT] | 5

African American History Is AMERICAN History

The fight for equality wasn’t fought alone. Black, White, Brown, and Asian activists—joined by clergy of every faith—stood together for justice. Meet one forgotten hero: June Shagaloff Alexander.

6 days ago | [YT] | 8

African American History Is AMERICAN History

In 1943, Black American soldiers in England faced a battle not against Hitler, but against Jim Crow. The clash became known as the Battle of Bamber Bridge—a night when Black troops stood up to racism within the U.S. Army itself.

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 7

African American History Is AMERICAN History

"More than a decade ago, I sat down with Marc Maron in his garage to tape something new called a podcast. This time, he came to me to record his last episode. We talked about the power of conviction, decency in an age of division, and the true story of America." - Barack Obama

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 4

African American History Is AMERICAN History

In 1944, the Port Chicago explosion killed 320—most of them young Black sailors. When survivors refused to keep working under unsafe, racist conditions, 50 were convicted of mutiny. Their act of defiance is a testament to those who chose to speak truth to power. Watch: Port Chicago: Tragedy, Racism, and Resistance.

3 weeks ago | [YT] | 9

African American History Is AMERICAN History

ZORA NEALE HURSTON’S PLAY COMES ALIVE FOR THE FIRST TIME
“Spunk,” a fable weaving together music and movement, is getting its first full staging since being rediscovered in 1997.

By Salamishah Tillet (The New York Times – October 11, 2025) www.nytimes.com/2025/10/11/theater/zora-neale-hurs…


Like her groundbreaking novel, “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” Hurston’s 1935 play, “Spunk,” has lively Black southern vernacular, a self-actualized heroine and witty, folk humor. But, even after that book became canonized, “Spunk” remained essentially unknown for years. That’s because, until its rediscovery in 1997, the play had languished in the Library of Congress’s drama collections.


But that only partly explains its absence. To mount a production as colorful and layered as her script envisioned, the play required not just critical will and patience but also a creative team capable of delving deeply into Hurston’s archives.


Set in the rural, segregated South, the story follows Spunk, an outsider, as he falls in love with Evalina, a married woman, and their attempts to overcome the naysayers, neighbors and even supernatural forces that try to prevent them from being together. When Hurston reimagined it as a play, she transformed it into a comedy, jettisoning its tragic elements and ending. She also incorporated sermons and sacred practices, like a conjure ceremony.



After the prizewinning short story version of “Spunk” was published in the National Urban League’s journal, Opportunity, Hurston spent the next decade conducting extensive ethnographic fieldwork in the South and the Caribbean, under the guidance of the anthropologist Franz Boas.

During this time, she even documented — and at times participated in — spiritual rituals. It was those experiences that led her to revisit “Spunk” and reshape her story as a play.


“You can feel Zora trying to get at what it means to have agency and liberty in your life, and mean not to be bound by what people tell you you’re supposed to do and how you’re supposed to do it,” said Tamilla Woodard, who is directing “Spunk” at Yale Rep.


Woodard was a second-year M.F.A. student in Yale’s acting department when Catherine Sheehy, a dramaturg and professor at Yale, heard an NPR story about Hurston’s unpublished works in 2001 and quickly requested a copy of “Spunk.” “I read and loved it,” Sheehy recalled. She “started giving it to friends, sharing it with my students, and passing it along to various directors, artistic directors and choreographers.”


“Spunk” was one of 10 Hurston plays rediscovered. (Not to be confused with George C. Wolfe’s 1989 staging of “Spunk,” an adaptation of three of Hurston’s stories: “Sweat,” “Story in Harlem Slang” and “The Gilded Six Bits.”)


“The Library of Congress used to hold these scripts for authors who couldn’t have a copyright on them because there was no production of them,” Sheehy said. “Then in the late ’90s, they started going through their files to see what they had.”


The plays were written after Hurston moved, in 1925, to Harlem from Eaton, Fla., to pursue her first passion: drama. But only one of her plays made it to Broadway in her lifetime: “Fast and Furious” in 1931.


And despite Hurston’s posthumous acclaim, a stage production of “Spunk” wasn’t a given. In 2021, Roundabout Theater Company hosted a virtual reading of the play. But the script itself is highly annotated with stage plans and production notes.


“The scripts have these little notations, like ‘Sing song here,’ and then there’s nothing,” said Jean Lee Cole, who, in 2008, edited with Charles Mitchell, “Zora Neale Hurston: Collected Plays,” an annotated volume of Hurston’s forgotten plays. “That was our biggest challenge.


When Sheehy first shared the play with Woodard, they knew producing it would be a long-term challenge, but maybe not 25 years. During that time, Woodard became the chair of the acting program at the Yale School of Drama and the resident director at Yale Repertory Theater. “She was the right person” to lead it, Sheehy said. “It was the fullness of time that made the best possible outcome for this play.”


For Nehemiah Luckett, the composer and music supervisor for the production, it also meant listening directly to Huston’s own voice, and the music she and the ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax collected during her travels in the South. “The first source material was the Library of Congress-filled recordings that we had of Zora, in which we have the opportunity to hear Zora singing, which is phenomenal,” Luckett said. “I spent a lot of time listening to those recordings to get into the mood and the zone and the era.”





But it was through Woodard’s detailed research that another important discovery occurred. “There is a photo from that time period of Zora on the porch with [the musician Rochelle French] and a well-known Blues artist, Gabriel Brown holding a guitar,” she said. “He might have been the origin of Zora’s Spunk character.” And given their similarities, also the muse for the bluesy, freedom-seeking turned heartbreaking Teacake, in “Their Eyes Were Watching God.”


Luckett added, “For the songs where we have lyrics but did not have music, it was actually just a very exciting journey of trying to write something that felt like it was of that time, but that would not be too unfamiliar to our ears today.”


As enriching as the music is, the choreography possesses its own electrifying dynamism, particularly in the movement featured in a work song set on a railroad track and a subsequent number at a juke joint, where the lovers first meet.


To create that meeting, the choreographer nicHi douglas also turned to Hurston’s research. “There is a field research video that depicts what I think is a version of a song and dance that we call ‘Baby Child’ on the show,” Douglas said. “And the way that the children were playing the circle game, all of the physicality in that specific video really anchored my approach to the world of the movement throughout the show.”

3 weeks ago | [YT] | 44

African American History Is AMERICAN History

Otis Boykin, the inventor who gave the world precision resistors that power our electronics, and made pacemakers reliable and affordable. His brilliance in STEM still saves lives today. Celebrate Boykin, and the legacy of Black inventors who transformed technology…and American history.

1 month ago | [YT] | 10

African American History Is AMERICAN History

Long before the Revolution, a free Black community thrived in Spanish Florida. Fort Mose—America’s first legally sanctioned free Black settlement—stood as a beacon of courage, resistance, and freedom. Discover the untold story that rewrites what you think you know about American history.

1 month ago | [YT] | 11

African American History Is AMERICAN History

https://youtu.be/Kw_4eZesY9I
She was called “The Black Garbo.” Nina Mae McKinney dazzled Hollywood, Broadway, and beyond—yet her story was nearly erased. Watch as African American History Is AMERICAN History restores the legacy of this forgotten Black star.

1 month ago | [YT] | 6

African American History Is AMERICAN History

Walter White may be the most important civil rights leader you’ve never heard of. As head of the NAACP, he battled lynching, segregation, and voter suppression. His fair-skin, blond hair & blue eyes were a vital advantage to his investigations in the South. Yet he declared: “My skin is white, my eyes are blue, my hair is blond…I am a Negro.”


He pushed President Truman to desegregate the military, built the NAACP into a national force, and launched the Legal Defense Fund—helping pave the way for Brown v. Board of Education. By his death in 1955, he had grown the NAACP fivefold and left a legacy as one of America’s most fearless freedom fighters.

1 month ago | [YT] | 8