On June 30th, the Southern Delaware Alliance for Racial Justice (SDARJ) hosted a powerful town hall at the Cinema Art Theater, gathering historians, educators, journalists, and community members to explore a subject too often left out of America’s semiquincentennial celebrations: the deep, complex, and largely untold story of Black Delaware.
In a vote with zero opposition in either chamber, the General Assembly affirms that Black history is Delaware’s history.
Most people think Memorial Day came from Congress. It didn’t. The real story starts with freed Black Americans in 1865. The black history of Memorial Day is powerful — and it’s been overlooked for too long.
The Southern Delaware Alliance for Racial Justice (SDARJ) recently hosted a powerful and eye-opening African American historical bus tour through Western Sussex County.
Samuel Eli Cornish was born in 1795 to free parents of mixed race and lived in the vicinity of Georgetown in Sussex County. A journalist, he was also an ordained Presbyterian minister, abolitionist, and publisher.
Long before West Fourth Street was renamed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Way, the corner of Fourth and DuPont Avenue in Lewes, Delaware held one of the most vital institutions in the region’s Black community: the Happy Day Club.
