Henry Louis Gates Jr. makes a case for saving racist imagery that worked in tandem with Jim Crow laws.

As a literary scholar and cultural historian who has spent a lifetime searching out African Americans' lost, forgotten and otherwise unheralded tales, I was honored to serve as a historical consultant on Steve McQueen's "12 Years a Slave," most certainly one of the most vivid and authentic portrayals of slavery ever captured in a feature film.

Why didn't more than one black person serve in the Senate during the Reconstruction era -- a condition that persisted until this year?

Cotton not only ruled in the South, but had a great role in the Northern banking industry, New England factories and in Great Britain.

Find out who came up with this promise to freed slaves after the Civil War, and how it fell through.