Farrell Evans
Farrell Evans is an award-winning journalist who writes about sports and history.
Articles From This Author
This Woman Built a Formidable Gambling Empire in 1920s Harlem
Madame Stephanie St. Clair was a Harlem entrepreneur with a head for numbers and a skill for minting cash—even during the Great Depression. But like most African Americans in the early 20th century, she found herself barred from traditional, white-dominated financial businesses ...read more
6 Decades Before Jackie Robinson, This Man Broke Baseball's Color Barrier
Sixty-three years before Jackie Robinson became the first African American in the modern era to play in a Major League Baseball game, Moses Fleetwood Walker debuted in the league on May 1, 1884 with the Toledo Blue Stockings in a 5-1 loss against the Louisville Eclipse. Walker, a ...read more
Who Invented Golf?
On March 6, 1457, King James II, who was the King of Scots from 1437 until his death in 1460, in an Act of Parliament banned citizens from playing football and golf. Scotsmen had allegedly been playing these games in the streets and churchyards, instead of practicing archery ...read more
6 Influential African American Judges
As the first Black U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall may be the best-known African American judge. Before his appointment to the high court in 1967 by President Lyndon B. Johnson, Marshall served as Solicitor General and before that on the Second Circuit in the U.S. ...read more
The First Black War Correspondent Reported from the Civil War's Front Lines
During the Civil War, hundreds of reporters from Union and Confederate newspapers published stories from battles on land and sea. Only one of those reporters was a Black man: Thomas Morris Chester, the nation’s first African American war correspondent. The invention of the ...read more
When Abraham Lincoln Tried to Resettle Free Black Americans in the Caribbean
On the night of December 31, 1862, a day before he issued the final Emancipation Proclamation to effectively end slavery in America, President Abraham Lincoln signed a contract with Bernard Kock, an entrepreneur and Florida cotton planter. Their agreement: to use federal funds to ...read more
Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass: Inside Their Complicated Relationship
In the middle of the 19th century, as the United States was ensnared in a bloody Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln and abolitionist Frederick Douglass stood as the two most influential figures in the national debate over slavery and the future of African Americans. They met ...read more
The 1860 Compromise That Would Have Preserved Slavery in the US Constitution
Following Abraham Lincoln’s victory in the 1860 presidential election, 11 southern states seceded from the Union. Slavery and states' rights had been at the center of the election, and Lincoln had vowed during his campaign to not restrict slavery where it already existed, but to ...read more
9 Baseball Stars From the Negro Leagues Who Dominated the Game
Until Jackie Robinson broke the Major League Baseball color line in 1947, Black Americans' professional baseball opportunities were limited primarily to the Negro Leagues. These leagues showcased impressive talent, from power hitters Buck Leonard and Josh Gibson to pitchers ...read more
How Interstate Highways Gutted Communities—and Reinforced Segregation
When Congress approved the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, it authorized what was then the largest public works program in U.S. history. The law promised to construct 41,000 miles of an ambitious interstate highway system that would criss-cross the nation, dramatically ...read more
What Was Flight 93's Target?
On the morning of September 11, 2001, 46 minutes into United Airlines Flight 93, a nonstop flight from Newark, New Jersey to San Francisco, four hijackers took control of the Boeing 757-222. It was around 9:30 a.m., and already that morning, two hijacked planes had shockingly ...read more
8 Moments When Radio Helped Bring Americans Together
For three decades starting in 1920, radio revolutionized American culture. At a time when most citizens still lived outside of big cities, radio technology—which allowed sound signals to be transmitted across long distances—made the sprawling nation feel smaller and more ...read more
How Nelson Mandela Used Rugby as a Symbol of South African Unity
On June 24, 1995 at Johannesburg's Ellis Park Stadium, South Africa won the Rugby World Cup 15-12 over its arch rival New Zealand. The match stands as a hugely symbolic moment in South African history. It marked the nation’s first major sporting event since the end of its ...read more
The 1967 Riots: When Outrage Over Racial Injustice Boiled Over
During the summer of 1967, 158 riots erupted in urban communities across America. Most shared the same triggering event: a dispute between Black citizens and white police officers that escalated to violence. During those convulsive months, the massive social unrest—alternately ...read more
The Unsung African American Scientists of the Manhattan Project
During the height of World War II between 1942 and 1945, the U.S. government’s top-secret program to build an atomic bomb, code-named the Manhattan Project, cumulatively employed some 600,000 people, including scientists, technicians, janitors, engineers, chemists, maids and day ...read more
What Role Did Airplanes Play in the Tulsa Race Massacre?
What role did airplanes play in the deadly Tulsa race massacre of 1921? Just after Memorial Day that year, a white mob destroyed 35 city blocks of the Greenwood District, a community in Tulsa, Oklahoma known as the “Black Wall Street.” Prompted by an allegation that a Black man ...read more
How Jim Crow-Era Laws Suppressed the African American Vote for Generations
Following the ratification in 1870 of the 15th Amendment, which barred states from depriving citizens the right to vote based on race, southern states began enacting measures such as poll taxes, literacy tests, all-white primaries, felony disenfranchisement laws, grandfather ...read more
One of the Earliest US Car Companies Was Founded by a Formerly Enslaved Man
C.R. Patterson & Sons, the first African American-owned auto manufacturer, didn’t produce many of its hand-built cars—by some estimates, only a few dozen between 1915 and 1918. The company’s signature Patterson-Greenfield car, advertised as a “sensibly priced” roadster with ...read more
How the Perfect Lawn Became a Symbol of the American Dream
With the rise of suburbia in post-WWII America, the perfect lawn became a potent symbol of the American dream. Whether a sprawling sweep of green mowed in crisp diagonal bands or a more modest swatch of grass and clover, a lawn expressed the national ideal that, with hard work, ...read more
Why Frederick Douglass Wanted Black Men to Fight in the Civil War
During the Civil War, Frederick Douglass used his stature as the most prominent African American social reformer, orator, writer and abolitionist to recruit men of his race to volunteer for the Union army. In his “Men of Color to Arms! Now or Never!” broadside, Douglass called on ...read more
America’s First Black Regiment Gained Their Freedom by Fighting Against the British
The 1st Rhode Island Regiment, widely regarded as the first Black battalion in U.S. military history, originated, in part, from George Washington’s desperation. In late 1777 during the American Revolution, the Continental Army, led by General Washington, faced severe troop ...read more
Reconstruction: A Timeline of the Post-Civil War Era
Between 1863 and 1877, the U.S. government undertook the task of integrating nearly four million formerly enslaved people into society after the Civil War bitterly divided the country over the issue of slavery. A white slaveholding south that had built its economy and culture on ...read more
Why Ice Cream Soared in Popularity During Prohibition
When Congress passed the Volstead Act in 1920, prohibiting the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages in the United States, the law nearly decimated the alcohol industry. But it helped give the nascent ice cream business a sweet boost. Between 1919 and 1929, federal tax ...read more
How Tuskegee Airmen Fought Military Segregation With Nonviolent Action
The Tuskegee Airmen are best known for proving during World War II that Black men could be elite fighter pilots. Less widely known is the instrumental role these pilots, navigators and bombardiers played during the war in fighting segregation through nonviolent direct action. ...read more
What Was Christmas Like for America’s Enslaved People?
How did Americans living under slavery experience the Christmas holidays? While early accounts from white Southerners after the Civil War often painted an idealized picture of owners’ generosity met by grateful workers happily feasting, singing and dancing, the reality was far ...read more
Why Harry Truman Ended Segregation in the US Military in 1948
When President Harry S. Truman signed Executive Order 9981 on July 26, 1948, calling for the desegregation of the U.S. Armed Forces, he repudiated 170 years of officially sanctioned discrimination. Since the American Revolution, African Americans had served in the military, but ...read more
6 Renowned Tuskegee Airmen
As the first Black aviators to serve in the U.S. Army Air Corps, the Tuskegee Airmen broke through a massive segregation barrier in the American military. Their success and heroism during World War II, fighting Germans in the skies over Europe, shattered pervasive stereotypes ...read more
The 1868 Louisiana Massacre that Reversed Reconstruction-Era Gains
In September 1868, a dispute over a column published in an Opelousas, Louisiana partisan newspaper provoked one of the bloodiest incidents of racial violence in the Reconstruction era. The attackers' goal: to reverse dramatic political gains made by Black citizens after the ...read more