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Black History Portal
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THE JOURNEY THROUGH TIME

Explore Black History

Explore the people, places, events, achievements, struggles and stories that shaped our journey.

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Civil Rights

Movements, leaders, victories and the continuing fight for equality.

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Black Inventors

Innovation, patents, science, technology and world-changing contributions.

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Sports

Pioneers, champions, Negro Leagues, records, activism and excellence.

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People

Meet the people whose lives, choices and achievements shaped the journey.

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Places

Black towns, communities, institutions and places where history happened.

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Events

Moments that changed communities, movements, institutions and the nation.

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MY'STORY

The MOVE Fire

This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985 Philadelphia police fired thousands of rounds at the MOVE house, city officials approved dropping an explosive device on the roof, the resulting fire was allowed to burn, 11 people—including five children—died, and 61 homes were destroyed. Philadelphia City Council later called it a “brutal attack carried out by the City of Philadelphia on its own citizens” and acknowledged that no individual faced criminal consequences for the bombing. One timeline correction worth preserving for the BHP record: the major previous MOVE-police confrontation was August 8, 1978, about seven years before the bombing, not a year or two earlier. Officer James Ramp was killed, other police and firefighters were wounded, nine MOVE members were later convicted, and television cameras recorded police beating Delbert Africa during his arrest. The 1985 MOVE Commission later specifically criticized city planners for failing to adequately use lessons from that 1978 confrontation. And that actually strengthens the point you’re making: 1985 did not happen without precedent or institutional memory. There had already been a deadly confrontation with MOVE, years of conflict, negotiations and police involvement before Osage Avenue.

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BLACK FACTS
The Truths They Never Taught You...

The Violence That Helped Spark the NAACP

In August 1908, a white mob attacked Springfield, Illinois’s Black community, destroying homes and businesses and lynching two Black men. National outrage over the violence helped spur the movement that created the NAACP the following year.

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BHP gathered finds from its connected research sources. Showing the 4 strongest Black History matches.
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Wikipedia

Deep image compositing

Deep image compositing is a way of compositing and rendering digital images that emerged in the mid-2010s. In addition to the usual color and opacity channels a notion of spatial depth is created. This allows multiple samples in the depth of the image to make up the final resulting color. This technique produces high quality results and removes artifacts around edges that could not be dealt with otherwise.

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Wikipedia

Deep focus

Deep focus is a photographic and cinematographic technique using a large depth of field. Depth of field is the front-to-back range of focus in an image, or how much of it appears sharp and clear. In deep focus, the foreground, middle ground, and background are all in focus. Deep focus is normally achieved by choosing a small aperture. Since the aperture of a camera determines how much light enters through the lens, achieving deep focus requires a bright scene or long exposure. A wide-angle lens also makes a larger portion of the image appear sharp. It is also possible to achieve the illusion of deep focus with optical tricks (split-focus diopter) or by compositing two or more images together using focus stacking. The opposite of deep focus is shallow focus, in which the plane of the image that is in focus is very shallow. For example, the foreground might be in focus while the middle-ground and background are out-of-focus. When avoiding deep focus is used specifically for aesthetic effect—especially when the subject is in sharp focus while the background is noticeably out-of-focus—the technique is known as bokeh.

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Wikipedia

Chandra Deep Field South

The Chandra Deep Field South (CDF-S) is a deep-sky survey field observed by the Chandra X-ray Observatory satellite. It contains only stars fainter than magnitude 14 lying in the Fornax constellation. The image is centered on RA 3h 32m28.0s, DEC −27° 48′ 30″, covering 0.11 square degrees and measuring 16 arcminutes across. The image was created by compositing 11 individual ACIS-I exposures for a cumulative exposure time of over one million seconds between 1999 and 2000, led by Riccardo Giacconi. Further observations taken until 2010 have resulted in a total of exposure of over four million seconds. The CDF-S is the single target where Chandra has observed the longest. This region was selected for observation because it has much less galactic dust than most other areas of the sky, reducing the risk of obscuration of distant sources. The field was extended to form the Extended Chandra Deep Field South (ECDF-S). The CDF-S has produced major discoveries in high-energy astronomy and served as a key field for multi-wavelength surveys such as GOODS. The fields themselves are considered "deep fields" because, similar to the Hubble Deep Field, they are able to see the most distant objects compared to other X-ray images of the Universe. But while the exposure time was similar to Hubble's, the CDF-S and ECDF-S both have a larger field of view.

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Wikipedia

Hubble Ultra-Deep Field

The Hubble Ultra-Deep Field (HUDF) is a deep-field image of a small region of space in the constellation Fornax, containing an estimated 10,000 galaxies. The original data for the image was collected by the Hubble Space Telescope from September 2003 to January 2004 and the first version of the image was released on March 9, 2004. It includes light from galaxies that existed about 13 billion years ago, some 400 to 800 million years after the Big Bang. The HUDF image was taken in a section of the sky with a low density of bright stars in the near-field, allowing much better viewing of dimmer, more distant objects. Located southwest of Orion in the southern-hemisphere constellation Fornax, the rectangular image is 2.4 arcminutes to an edge, or 3.4 arcminutes diagonally. This is about one-tenth of the angular diameter of a full moon viewed from Earth (less than 34 arcminutes), smaller than a 1 mm2 piece of paper held 1 m away, and equal to roughly one twenty-six-millionth of the total area of the sky. The image is oriented so that the upper left corner points toward north (−46.4°) on the celestial sphere. In August and September 2009, the HUDF field was observed at longer wavelengths (1.0 to 1.6 μm) using the infrared channel of the recently fitted Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3). This additional data enabled astronomers to identify a new list of potentially very distant galaxies. On September 25, 2012, NASA released a new version of the Ultra-Deep Field dubbed the eXtreme Deep Field (XDF). The XDF reveals galaxies from 13.2 billion years ago, including one thought to have formed only 450 million years after the Big Bang. On June 3, 2014, NASA released the Hubble Ultra Deep Field 2014 image, the first HUDF image to use the full range of ultraviolet to near-infrared light. A composite of separate exposures taken in 2002 to 2012 with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide Field Camera 3, it shows some 10,000 galaxies. On January 23, 2019, the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias released an even deeper version of the infrared images of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field obtained with the WFC3 instrument, named the ABYSS Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The new images improve the previous reduction of the WFC3/IR images, including careful sky background subtraction around the largest galaxies on the field of view. After this update, some galaxies were found to be almost twice as big as previously measured.

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TOPIC OF THE DAY

Greenwood / Black Wall Street

Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.

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TRIVIA QUESTION OF THE DAY

Which Black woman became the first elected to the United States Congress?

Shirley Chisholm, elected in 1968.