¹ Patrice Peck, “Black Journalists Are Exhausted,” New York Times Online, 29 May 2020, at www.nytimes.com/2020/05/29/opinion/coronavirus-black-people-media.html. For more on Freedom's Journal see Bacon, Jacqueline, Freedom's Journal: The First African-American Newspaper (Lanham, MD, 2007)Google Scholar.

² Evan Hill, Ainara Tiefenthäler, Christaan Trieberg, Drew Jordan, Haley Willis, and Robin Stein, “How George Floyd Was Killed in Police Custody,” New York Times Online, at www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/us/george-floyd-investigation.html?searchResultPosition=5.

³ John Elder, “Investigative Update on Critical Incident,” Minneapolis Police Department Webpage, 26 May 2020, at www.insidempd.com/2020/05/26/man-dies-after-medical-incident-during-police-interaction.

⁴ Christine Hauser, Derrick Bryson Taylor, and Neil Vigdor, “‘I Can't Breathe’: 4 Minneapolis Officers Fired after Black Man Dies in Custody,” New York Times, 27 May 2020, at www.nytimes.com/2020/05/26/us/minneapolis-police-man-died.html.

⁵ Patrice Stockman, “‘They Have Lost Control’: Why Minneapolis Burned,” New York Times, 2 July 2020, at www.nytimes.com/2020/07/03/us/minneapolis-government-george-floyd.html.

⁶ “Protests across the Globe after George Floyd's Death,” CNN, 13 June 2020, at www.cnn.com/2020/06/06/world/gallery/intl-george-floyd-protests/index.html; Melissa Noel, “The Fight against Racial Justice Is a Caribbean Fight Too,” Essence Magazine, 17 July 2020, at www.essence.com/feature/united-states-caribbean-relations-solidarity-protests.

⁷ “Protests across the Globe after George Floyd's Death”; Zamira Rahim and Rob Picheta, “Thousands around the World Protest George Floyd's Death in Global Display of Solidarity,” CNN.com, 1 June 2020, at www.cnn.com/2020/06/01/world/george-floyd-global-protests-intl/index.html; “George Floyd: Protests around the World Show Solidarity with US Demonstrators,” USA Today, 18 July 2020, at www.usatoday.com/picture-gallery/news/world/2020/06/03/george-floyd-protests-around-world-show-solidarity-us-demonstrators/3133960001; “How George Floyd's Death Sparked Protests around the World,” Washington Post, 10 June 2020, at www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/world/2020/06/10/how-george-floyds-death-sparked-protests-around-world.

⁸ On the burning of the Wendy's where Rayshaud Brooks was shot by Atlanta Police see Ray Sanchez, “Atlanta Wendy's Where Rayshaud Brooks Was Killed Has Been Demolished,” CNN.com, 14 July 2020, at www.cnn.com/2020/07/14/us/rayshard-brooks-wendys-demolished/index.html; Jennifer Calfas and Katie Honan, “Atlanta Police Shooting Sparks New Outrage,” Wall Street Journal, 15 June 2020, at www.wsj.com/articles/atlanta-police-chief-to-resign-after-shooting-of-unarmed-black-man-11592087452. For more on Black Lives Matter protests in London's Trafalgar Square see “London Protests: Demonstrators Clash with Police,” BBC.com, 13 June 2020, at www.bbc.com/news/uk-53031072; Ylvia Hui and Arno Pedra, “From Minneapolis to Paris and London: Right-Wing Demonstrators and BLM Protesters Hit the Streets in Europe,” Chicago Tribune, 13 June 2020, at www.chicagotribune.com/nation-world/ct-nw-london-protests-paris-protests-20200613-64rglqweqvegthuzkkbcmphdse-story.html.

⁹ “Protests across the Globe after George Floyd's Death”; Rahim and Picheta, “Thousands around the World Protest George Floyd's Death”; “George Floyd: Protests around the World Show Solidarity with US Demonstrators”; “How George Floyd's Death Sparked Protests around the World.”

¹⁰ Nora McGreevy, “British Protesters Throw Statue of Slave Trader into Bristol Harbor,” Smithsonian Magazine, 10 June 2020, at www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/protesters-throw-slavers-statue-bristol-harbor-make-waves-across-britain-180975060.

¹¹ Jacqueline Charles, “People in These Caribbean Nations Want Statutes of Columbus and Lord Nelson Taken Down,” Miami Herald, 12 June 2020, at www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/article243425806.html; Noel, “The Fight against Racial Justice Is a Caribbean Fight Too.”

¹² Luke Henriques-Gomes and Elias Visontay, “Australian Black Lives Matter Protests: Tens of Thousands Demand End to Indigenous Deaths in Custody,” The Guardian, 6 June 2020, at www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jun/06/australian-black-lives-matter-protests-tens-of-thousands-demand-end-to-indigenous-deaths-in-custody; “Australians Protest against Racial Injustice, Deaths in Custody,” AlJazeera.com, 13 June 2020, at www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/6/13/australians-protest-against-racial-injustice-deaths-in-custody.

¹³ For examples of typical mainstream media responses to protests taking place after the death of George Floyd in 2020 see, for example, Jenny Jarvie and Melissa Etehad, “‘How Are We Here Again?’ Black America on Edge after Killing of George Floyd,” Los Angeles Times, 29 May 2020, at www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-05-29/how-are-we-here-again-black-america-on-edge-after-police-killing-of-george-floyd; Spencer Bokatt-Lindell, “Why Is Police Brutality Still Happening?”, New York Times, 28 May 2020, at www.nytimes.com/2020/05/28/opinion/minneapolis-police-brutality.html?searchResultPosition=20; Sarah Kerr, Mike Shum, Katie G. Nelson, Dmitry Khavin, and Haley Willis, “Video: Minneapolis Precinct Fire: How a Night of Chaos Unfolded,” New York Times, 29 May 2020, at www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000007162707/minneapolis-police-protest-burn.html?searchResultPosition=26; Andrew Beaton and Ben Cohen, “Colin Kaepernick's Protest Is Raging across America,” Wall Street Journal, 1 June 2020, at www.wsj.com/articles/colin-kaepernick-george-floyd-and-the-era-of-athlete-activism-11591012801?page=50. For an article investigating the disconnect between mainstream surprise on police murder of black people and the expectations of violence in the black community see Kurtis Lee, “Breonna Taylor's Death Shocked the Nation. In Louisville, Black People Are Far from Surprised,” Los Angeles Times, 27 Sept. 2020, www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-09-27/la-na-breonna-taylor-louisville. For archival sources reflecting mainstream media responses to urban uprisings after the death of Martin Luther King Jr in 1968, the beating of Rodney King in 1992, and the police murder of Michael Brown in 2014 see, for example, Douglas E. Kneeland, “Behind the Violence: Despair and Spring Madness,” New York Times, 12 April 1968, 20; Willard Clopton, “Curfew Imposed as Roving Bands Plunder and Burn,” Washington Post, 6 April 1968, A1, A14; Seth Mydans, “The Police Verdict: Verdict Sets off a Wave of Shock and Anger,” New York Times, 30 April 1992, D22; Ruth Marcus, “History of Mistrust May Have Contributed to Riots,” Washington Post, 2 May 1992, A18; Samantha Storey, “Scenes of Chaos Unfold after a Peaceful Vigil in Ferguson,” New York Times, 12 Aug. 2014, at www.nytimes.com/2014/08/13/us/after-a-peaceful-vigil-in-ferguson-scenes-of-chaos-unfold.html?searchResultPosition=16; Jim Slater, Mark Berman, and Todd C. Frankel, “Uncovering Source behind City's Unrest,” Washington Post, 13 Aug. 2014, 10.

¹⁴ “Protests across the Globe after George Floyd's Death”; Rahim and Picheta, “Thousands around the World Protest George Floyd's Death”; “George Floyd: Protests around the World Show Solidarity with US Demonstrators”; “How George Floyd's Death Sparked Protests around the World.”

¹⁵ Karen Grisby Bates, “1968–2020: A Tale of Two Uprisings,” Code Switch, NPR Online, 3 June 2020, at www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/06/03/869138222/1968-2020-a-tale-of-two-uprisings; Rachel Chason and Rebecca Tan, “For Black Residents Who Saw D.C. Burn Decades Ago, Floyd Protests Felt Like Hope,” Washington Post, 16 June 2020, at www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-politics/dc-protests-1968-george-floyd/2020/06/15/bc5475e6-ab28-11ea-9063-e69bd6520940_story.html; Ted Anthony, “In George Floyd Protests, Echoes of 1968 Social Unrest,” Christian Science Monitor, 31 May 2020, at www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2020/0531/In-George-Floyd-protests-echoes-of-1968-social-unrest; Mark Z. Barbarak, “News Analysis: Racism, Unrest, Police Brutality: Is America Living 1968 All Over Again? Yes and No,” Los Angeles Times, 4 June 2020, at www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-06-04/george-floyd-protests-1968-parallels-2020-election. For two op-eds discussing how 2020 was not like 1968 see Thomas J. Sugrue, “2020 Is Not 1968: To Understand Today's Protests You Must Look Further Back,” National Geographic, 11 June 2020, at www.nationalgeographic.com/history/2020/06/2020-not-1968; Sugrue, “Stop Comparing Today's Protests to 1968,” Washington Post, 11 June 2020, at www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/06/11/protests-1968-george-floyd.

¹⁶ See, for example, Neal Justin, “Floyd Story Got Personal for Black Journalists,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, 4 July 2020, at www.startribune.com/floyd-story-got-personal-for-black-journalists/571607492/; L. Z. Granderson, “George Floyd and the Special Hell Reserved for Journalists Covering His Killing,” Los Angeles Times, 30 May 2020, at www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/george-floyd-and-the-special-hell-reserved-for-black-journalists-covering-his-killing.

¹⁷ Stephon Johnson, “It's All Happening Again: Police Kill George Floyd, Protests Ensue,” Amsterdam News, 28 May 2020, http://amsterdamnews.com/news/2020/may/28/its-happening-again-police-kill-george-floyd-prote; “As America Confronts Old Demons after George Floyd's Death, a 1770 Slaying Is Recalled,” Los Angeles Times, 4 June 2020, at www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-06-04/as-nation-confronts-old-demons-a-1770-slaying-is-recalled.

¹⁸ Sugrue, “2020 Is Not 1968; Sugrue, “Stop Comparing Today's Protests to 1968. See also Brandon Byrd, “As BLM Goes Global, It's Building on Centuries of Black Internationalist Struggle,” IBW21.org, 5 Aug. 2020, https://ibw21.org/editors-choice/as-blm-goes-global-its-building-on-centuries-of-black-internationalist-struggle.

¹⁹ For more on sankofa, including analysis of various translations of the word and concept, see Seeman, Erik, “Reassessing the ‘Sankofa Symbol’ in New York's African Burial Ground,” William and Mary Quarterly 67/1 (2010), 101–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 109 n. 16, citing Willis, W. Bruce, The Akindra Dictionary: A Visual Primer on the Language of Akindra (Washington, DC, 1998), 188Google Scholar; Quarcoo, Alfred Kofi, The Language of Adinkra Patterns, 2nd edn (Legon, Ghana, 1994), 17Google Scholar; and Daniel Mato, “Clothed in Symbol: The Art of Akindra among the Akan of Ghana” (Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University, 1987).

²⁰ For a far more thorough summary of the history of the discipline's opposition to presentism see David Armitage, “In Defense of Presentism,” in Darrin M. McMahon, ed., History and Human Flourishing (Oxford, forthcoming), available at https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/armitage/files/armitage_in_defence_of_presentism.pdf.

²¹ Lynn Hunt, “Against Presentism,” Perspectives on History, 1 May 2002, www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/may-2002/against-presentism.

²² Ibid.

²³ A new federal rule excluding oral history and historical scholarship from IRB review was passed in January 2017 and was intended to go into effect on 19 January 2018. This rule superseded the regulations found in 45 CFR 46, implemented in 1981 and revised in 1991. In April 2018, the Department of Health and Human Services delayed the implementation of the new rule until January 2019. See 45 CFR 46; “Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects,” 19 Jan. 2017, 82 FR 7149; “Federal Policy for the Protection of Research Subjects: Proposed Six Month Delay of the General Compliance Date While Allowing the Use of Three Burden-Reducing Provisions during the Delay Period,” 20 April 2018, 83 FR 17595.

²⁴ Anthropologist Christen Smith uses the term sequelae, which she defines as the “gendered, reverberating deadly effects of state terror that infect the affective communities of the dead,” to understand the compounding gendered, medical and psychological effects of ongoing state violence against black people. The concept of the “wake” was developed by English professor Christina Sharpe and describe the way in which historical and contemporary black life exists as part of the same afterlife of slavery. Comparative-literature scholar Saidiya Hartman has written repeatedly on the violence that the historical archive does in its failure to document and recognize the agency of black lives. See Smith, Christen A., “Facing the Dragon: Black Mothering, Sequelae, and Gendered Necropolitics in the Americas,” Transforming Anthropology 24/1 (2016), 31–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sharpe, Christina, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC, 2016)Google Scholar; Hartman, Saidiya V., Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1997)Google Scholar; Hartman, , “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12/2 (2008), 1–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁵ Du Bois, W. E. B., The Souls of Black Folk (1903) (New Haven, 2015), 1Google Scholar.

²⁶ Gomez, Michael A., “Of Du Bois and Diaspora: The Challenge of African American Studies,” Journal of Black Studies 35/2 (2004), 125–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ewing, Adam, The Age of Garvey: How a Jamaican Activist Changed Global Politics (Princeton, 2014)Google Scholar; Taylor, Ula, The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey (Chapel Hill, 2002)Google Scholar.

²⁷ Gomez, “Of Du Bois and Diaspora,” 177, arguing as of 2004, that the conversation regarding the connections between African-descended people in all parts of the globe dated back at least five hundred years.

²⁸ I cannot in any way do justice in this short essay to the history of the field of African diaspora. However, for a small sample of key pioneering studies see Gilroy, Paul, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA, 1993)Google Scholar; Clifford, James, “Diasporas,” Cultural Anthropology 9/3 (1994), 302–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar; John K. Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 (New York, 1998); Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill, 1998); Margaret Washington, A Peculiar People: Slave Religion and Community-Culture among the Gullahs (New York, 1988); Patterson, Tiffany Ruby and Kelley, Robin D. G., “Unfinished Migrations: Reflections on the African Diaspora and the Making of the Modern World,” African Studies Review 43/1 (2000), 11–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁹ Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (New York, 2003); Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA, 2003); Keisha Blain, Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (Philadelphia, 2018).

³⁰ Kelley, Freedom Dreams, 1–12.

³¹ For more on Afro-Asian and Afro-Muslim solidarities see Penny von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anti-colonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, 1997); Sohail Daulatzai, Black Star, Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and Black Freedom beyond America (Minneapolis, 2012); Marc Gallicchio, The African American Encounter with Japan and China: Black Internationalism in Asia, 1895–1945 (Chapel Hill, 2000); Bill V. Mullen, Afro-orientalism (Minneapolis, 2004); Blain, Keisha, “‘[F]or the Rights of Dark People in Every Part of the World’: Pearl Sherrod, Black Internationalist Feminism, and Afro-Asian Politics during the 1930s,” Souls 17/1–2 (2015), 90–112CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³² Von Eschen, Race against Empire, 8; Gerald Horne, The Rise and Fall of the Associated Negro Press: Claude Barnett's Pan-African News and the Jim Crow Paradox (Urbana–Champaign, 2017).

³³ For more on the 1619 Project, including debates on the factual integrity of the project, see Victoria Bynum, James M. MacPherson, James Oakes, Sean Wilentz, and Gordon S. Wood, “RE: The 1619 Project,” New York Times Magazine, 29 Dec. 2019, at www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/magazine/we-respond-to-the-historians-who-critiqued-the-1619-project.html; Adam Serwer, “The Fight over the 1619 Project Is Not about the Facts,” The Atlantic, 23 Dec. 2019, at www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/12/historians-clash-1619-project/604093; Sean Wilentz, “A Matter of Facts,” The Atlantic, 22 Jan. 2020, at www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/1619-project-new-york-times-wilentz/605152; David Waldstreicher, “The Hidden Stakes of the 1619 Controversy,” Boston Review, 24 Jan. 2020, http://bostonreview.net/race-politics/david-waldstreicher-hidden-stakes-1619-controversy. For more on the formation of the African American Intellectual History Society see “About AAIHS,” African-American Intellectual History Society, at www.aaihs.org/about/; “About,” Black Perspectives, https://www.aaihs.org/about-black-perspectives.

³⁴ Joanne Meyerowitz, “180 Op-Eds: Or How to Make the Present Historical,” Journal of American History 107/2 (2020), 323–35, at 327.

³⁵ Professor Hunt wrote, “There is a certain irony in the presentism of our current historical understanding: it threatens to put us out of business as historians.” Hunt, “Against Presentism.”

³⁶ Heather Schwedel, “There's Been a Run on Anti-racist Books,” Slate, 1 June 2020, at https://slate.com/culture/2020/06/antiracist-books-sold-out-amazon-george-floyd-protests.html.

³⁷ Francine Keifer, “On Stories of Black Struggle, an Iconic L.A. Bookstore Surges,” Christian Science Monitor, 12 June 2020, at www.csmonitor.com/Books/2020/0612/On-stories-of-Black-struggle-an-iconic-L.A.-bookstore-surges.