The National Museum of African American History and Culture represented the culmination of a struggle that had begun more than a century earlier—a struggle not simply to preserve Black history, but to establish that African American history belongs at the center of the American story. Ten years later, as the United States commemorates its 250th anniversary, that mission carries renewed significance.

The deaths of several Black Americans found hanging in communities across the South have prompted renewed demands for thorough investigations while reopening one of the most painful chapters in American racial history.

In the closing years of the 19th century, Wilmington, North Carolina, offered a glimpse of what American democracy might become.

History has a way of placing events beside one another that, at first glance, seem unrelated. September 4 is one of those dates.