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As the faculty research coordinator at the Othering and Belonging Institute, I have played an instrumental role in working with the associate director, Denise Herd, to implement cross-campus programming for the institute’s 400 Years of Resistance to Slavery and Injustice yearlong initiative. On campus, there has been an amazing response from people who are using this opportunity to program around the initiative.

It was during my freshman year of college, May of 1992, when the Los Angeles riots erupted. Fires blazed, and stores were looted and damaged as police tried to regain order in the fragmented community. News stations televised vivid images of the city unraveling in the aftermath of the savage public beating of Rodney King, an unarmed black man. The scene was like watching a modern-day lynching caught on film and pushed out through the media for millions of people to see. 

Critically acclaimed composer, recording artist, drummer, activist, and educator Mark Lomax II and The Urban Art Ensemble will present “400: An Afrikan Epic – Blues in August” in a free performance.  The group’s 75-minute OWU performance will be drawn from Lomax’s 12-album collection, “400: An Afrikan Epic.” Released in 2019, the collection “traces the epic history of Black America, not only during the 400 years from the beginning of the Transatlantic slave trade but back through thousands of years of history on the African continent and into an optimistic future for the African

"It is not our purpose to question the significance of slavery in the American past.

Mr. Ted T. Ellis is an artist and cultural historian, and he currently serves as the Vice Chair of the national 400 Years of African American History Commission. For more than 25 years, Ellis has created over 5,000 paintings that capture scenes from southern churches, courtrooms, families, and everyday life of African Americas’ 400-year journey. Developed exclusively for viewing at Old Dominion University, this exhibition features more than 20 original pieces that speak to the totality of African American experiences and contributions from the past to the present.

Supervisor Shamann Walton announced Friday that he’s asking the city to develop a reparations plan for the Black community.

“The effect of slavery still remains and still resonates in our policies,” Walton said. “I am committed to create an advisory committee to develop a true reparations plan that will address the systemic inequities that continue to exist in our African American communities and neighborhoods.”

Ghana has attracted visitors from all over the world with its "Year of Return" campaign, an initiative that began in 2019 to mark 400 years since the first documented slave ship from Africa landed in Virginia. The Ghana Tourism Authority and Ministry of Tourism, Arts, and Culture is encouraging the African diaspora to "come home" to the country many of those ships departed from. 

That former student, galvanized by a film he’d recently starred in, was actor Nate Parker. That film, “The Great Debaters,” about the creation of a winning all-Black college debating team in Depression-era Texas, inspired Parker and Favors to create an organization that developed curriculums and presentations around the movie. It led, Favors said in an interview with Amsterdam News, “To us doing a lot of work in the community.”

The legacy of slavery remains 400 years after the arrival of the first slaves to America, in laws, policies, actions and attitudes, speakers said at a black law association luncheon Saturday.

Nikole Hannah-Jones, the reporter behind The New York Times' popular "1619 Project" — a sprawling package of stories that posits that the true beginning of United States history starts when the first African slaves arrived in Virginia 400 years ago — will speak at the University of Michigan. 

In 2019, Virginia commemorated the 400th anniversary of the first enslaved Africans brought to English North America.

In 1619, about 20 Africans were brought against their will to Point Comfort, where Fort Monroe in Hampton, Virginia is located today. A historical marker now stands there.

African American culinary traditions have a long and storied history, but their influence doesn’t often receive the recognition it deserves. This winter, though, one New York museum will begin to rectify that situation, via a Kickstarter-funded exhibit dedicated to the black chefs, farmers, and food and drink producers who made the country’s cuisine what it is today.

Marking the 400th anniversary of African enslavement in the Anglo-United States, 2019 has been a year of bitter remembrance. Commemoration events, conferences, congressional hearings, news reports and public awareness initiatives crammed our calendars over the past 12 months with retrospectives on America’s heritage of racial slavery and its damaging legacies among present-day African American communities.