Africana Studies at Penn

📸 Throwback to April 15, 2026, when we had the excellent Performance Poet and Frederick Douglass Historian Nathan Richardson on the Penn campus for a reenactment of Frederick Douglass’s 1852 speech, “What to the Slave is the 4th of July?” and to answer questions about Frederick Douglass life and ideas while in character. This event was co-sponsored by the Penn Department of History .

Two of America’s oldest Black-owned banks are joining forces in a move that could strengthen access to capital in Black communities. If approved, the merger would create the largest Black-owned bank in the United States by assets. - learn more about the proposed merger of Optus Bank and Mechanics & Farmers Bank from AP

Two historic Black-owned banks plan merger to create the nation's largest Black-owned bank Optus Bank and Mechanics & Farmers Bank plan to merge, creating the largest Black-owned bank in the U.S., impacting Black communities.

Betye Saar, the pioneering artist best known for The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972), has died at the age of 99. A leading figure of the Black Arts Movement, she used assemblage and found objects to challenge racist stereotypes and explore Black identity, history, spirituality, and liberation.

Artist Betye Saar, whose work reflects Black identity, dies at 99 Artist Betye Saar has died in Los Angeles at 99. Saar’s death on Sunday was confirmed by relatives Monday. She would have turned 100 this week.

This Associated Press report examines how changes in U.S. foreign aid and abortion policy are affecting reproductive health care in Africa, including debates surrounding the Maputo Protocol, a 2003 African Union treaty on the rights of women.

Women are dying in Africa as US ramps up its global battle against abortion The Trump administration's new, sweeping restrictions on U.S. funding for nongovernmental organizations, foreign governments and U.N. agencies that promote access to abortion overseas is delivering new momentum to U.S. anti-abortion groups.

African American engagement with Africa has often focused on West and Southern Africa. But Sudan has also played an important role in shaping conversations about Pan-Africanism, race, and global Black solidarity.
In this essay from the African American Intellectual Historical Society, historian Nemata Blyden examines Christopher Tounsel's Bounds of Blackness: African Americans, Sudan, and the Politics of Solidarity, exploring how African Americans have understood -and at times redefined - the meaning and boundaries of Blackness through their engagement with Sudan.

The Complex Relationship Between African Americans and Sudan | AAIHS This post is part of our online roundtable on Christopher Tounsel’s Bounds of Blackness. Rally in Washington, DC, occurring on April 30, 2006 (runningtwig / ...

This Day in History on July 28, 1915, U.S. Marines landed in Haiti, beginning a 19-year occupation that transformed the nation's political and economic institutions. By dismantling local resistance and establishing a centralized military force - encompassing U.S. citizens and Haitians and controlled by the U.S. Marines - the intervention concentrated total authority in Port-au-Prince. Many historians argue that these institutional changes weakened Haiti's democratic development and contributed to the conditions that later enabled the Duvalier dictatorship. The occupation remains a defining chapter in Haitian history and in U.S.–Caribbean relations.

Invade Haiti, Wall Street Urged. The U.S. Obliged. (Published 2022) The long occupation of Haiti began with a drumbeat from the bank that became Citigroup, decades of diplomatic correspondence and other records show.