Guardians of Black History

BlackPast.org is a Seattle-based educational resource for African American and global African history. The website is among the most reliable and popular online Black history and scholarship sources. BlackPast.org is visited by millions of people each year, and in February 2023, it achieved the milestone of 50 million unique site visitors. The website has received the National Education Association’s Carter G. Woodson Memorial Award, the James and Janie Washington Foundation Award for Documentation, and MARS: Emerging Technologies in Reference, Reference and Users Services Association (RUSA) of the American Library Association (ALA) "Best Free Website" award. BlackPast.org is a vital resource for students, educators, and media professionals. 

For example, WETA used BlackPast.org content for its Making Black America series. We were most recently cited as a source for a New York Times article on Alice Ball, a Black woman chemist who worked on the cure for leprosy (Hansen disease). In addition, we explore thousands of people, places, and events that have shaped the history of people of African descent across the globe, on all seven continents, and from prehistoric times to the present day.

The BlackPast.org website serves the global community and meets the need for unbiased, fact-based Black history. Our website includes over 7,000 entries celebrating the mighty and the humble. It exposes visitors to places and events of Black history. In addition, we host a visual timeline of African American history specially designed and donated by a UK-based tech company to serve our young visitors better. We also have primary documents, a blog with long-form articles on obscure aspects of Black history written from different viewpoints, special collections pages dedicated to STEM, the Negro Baseball Leagues, Buffalo Soldiers, and more.

BlackPast.org delves deeply into the stories of Africa and the Black diaspora, far beyond the most well-known elements of African American history. Therefore, ensuring the sustainability of BlackPast.org is vital to the site's continued role as a leading source of Black history education. 

Since BlackPast.org's launch in 2007, our annual audience has grown to more than 36 times its original size (from 165,000 to 6,000,000), the page count has increased nearly tenfold (from 800 to 7,600), and we have worked with 920 contributors. The website is ungated and accessible to anyone with an internet connection. Because BlackPast.org does not charge people to use our catalog, the website's future viability depends upon the generosity of donors who believe in knowledge being factual, inclusive, and accessible. BlackPast.org safeguards the truth of our common humanity through content spotlighting people, places, and events of Black history in every U.S. state and independent nation in the world and those in dependent territories as well. 

Ensuring that BlackPast.org continues its mission to seek out Black history in all its diverse settings is even more critical in global and U.S. politics, where misdirected outrage has led to book banning, censorship, and promotion of revisionist interpretations of American and Black history. Knowledge is the only antidote to intolerance. Please support our mission to preserve Black history education and consider becoming a guardian today by donating to BlackPast.org.