Arts, Culture, Family & Religion

Alice Dunbar Nelson was a poet, critic, journalist and activist who was a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance.

John and Delores Moaney played an indispensable role in the lives of Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower. Explore the story of how the Moaney family became intertwined with the Eisenhowers here.

This features a bust-length photographic portrait of Rev. William Jackson and about his involvement in a trial for William Henry Taylor, a freedom seeker, related to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 held in Independence Hall.

This is a half-length portrait of the Reverend Absalom Jones in his ecclesiastical robes, with Bible in hand.

Absalom Jones, founder and pastor of the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas, preached "A Thanksgiving Sermon" on January 1, 1808 in recognition of the "Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves." In his sermon, the Reverend Jones proposed that January 1—the first day of the ban on the importation of slaves into the United States— be observed each year as a day of public thanksgiving.

This is a page from Amy Matilda Cassey's friendship album most likely written by either Margaretta or Mary Forten, daughters of James Forten. This page has a drawing of a forget-me-not flower, the subject of the poem, along with a poem.

In the spring of 1878, Daniel and Willianna Hickman and about 150 other formerly enslaved people left Georgetown, Kentucky. They traveled by train to Ellis, Kansas and then on foot to Nicodemus. Attracted by the allure of what was predicted to be the “largest Colored Community in America”, the Hickmans and others saw homesteading on the frontier of Kansas as a new beginning. As a Baptist pastor, Daniel was leadership figure in the Black community of Nicodemus.

The remains of the only remaining western town established by African Americans during the Reconstruction Period following the Civil War are preserved today as Nicodemus National Historic Site.

Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ on Chicago’s South Side was the location of Emmett Till’s funeral in September 1955.

In the Reconstruction period following the Civil War, newly freed African Americans faced monumental challenges to establish their own households, farm their own lands, establish community institutions and churches, and to pursue equal justice under the law in a period of racist violence. A new NPS report presents the story of the extraordinary accomplishments of rural African Americans in Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia.