David Grayton IV stands before a bank of photographers and flexes his muscles, his smile illuminated by flashbulbs. It’s fight day, and the 25-year-old is about weigh in for the third professional fight of his young career. 

“Pump Me Up: D.C. Subculture of the 1980s,” A D.C.-centric show about the city’s graffiti and street art during the rise of the go-go, punk and hardcore music scenes in the 1980s. Thursdays-Wednesdays, Corcoran Gallery of Art, 500 17th St. NW. 202-639-1700. www.corcoran.org. $10, $8 for students and seniors, free for children 12 and younger.

As President Obama and congressional leaders unveiled the statue of Rosa Parks at the Capitol Wednesday morning, a group of civil rights veterans gathered across the street to discuss the latest voting rights case to come before the Supreme Court.

I was among a group of writers, musicians and scholars of go-go music presenting at a seminar for D.C. social studies teachers last month when moderator Kenny Carroll asked me a provocative question.

Anacostia’s main fitness center on Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue closed this month due to hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid rent, and the community is now left wanting in the gym’s absence. D.C. Council member Marion Barry (D-Ward 8) had moved to put a stay on the closure but to no avail.  

I hope God doesn’t tell Dr. Ben Carson to run for president of the United States anytime soon, because I don’t think the world-renowned surgeon is ready. Carson has been all the rage of the conservative movement in recent weeks after he appeared at the National Prayer Breakfast this month. Since then, he has been mentioned as a potential candidate in 2016 by various media outlets, and I think he’d have a good shot at the nomination.

Gazing across the Detroit River and the skyline of Windsor, Ontario from a high-rise condominium in downtown Detroit, Rosa Parks often spoke about how the Underground Railroad heroically ran slaves into Canada.

Superintendents  all over the country are under mounting pressure to ensure high academic achievement for their students, provide safe and nurturing school environments and treat students equitably.

But school superintendents are often lightning rods — especially in urban districts — and bear the brunt of a school system’s success or failure. Indeed, urban school district chiefs often last an average of just 3.6 years on the  job.
Tuesday, on “Know-It-All, The ABCs of Education,” our guests were three current and retired superintendents of large urban school districts, who divulged the insider secrets to keeping their heads under such pressures. We had a wide-ranging discussion about education “reform,” students and families living in poverty, school safety after Newtown, the piece of criticism that has most affected them as superintendents, student equity, and so much more. You can listen to the show here.

Before mass shootings at Aurora and Newtown put gun control at the forefront of the nation’s attention, America’s trigger-happy gun culture also crystallized when 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot and killed by neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman. 

When The Washington Post ran a series last month encouraging black men to discuss their fears, it prompted me to consider my own. In a casual conversation with a teacher colleague, I admitted to her that my biggest fear as a black man was fitting a profile; being falsely accused of something because I cast the wrong image. She looked at me in bewilderment and confusion. After all, how could she understand that?

   The slayings of all children are horrible, yet even in death, they are not treated equally.

If slayings happen in a single event, as in the terrible shooting deaths of 20 children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., there is public and media outrage. And if the killing is believed to be racially motivated, as in the Trayvon Martin case, civil rights leaders bring thousands to protests, as they did in Sanford, Fla., to push for punishment of George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watch member accused of shooting Martin. All that is as it should be.

Below, find excepts from an engaging Twitter chat that RootDC columnist Rahiel Tesfamariam hosted on February 20th around our first BrotherSpeak video, this one entitled “Fear”.”

As you may know, BrotherSpeak is a three-part video series that gave voice to a range of black men about what matters most to them. For the series, we asked 18 black men to discuss three words: Fear, love and dream. Each video focuses on one word.

What a weekend. It was one thing to watch a couple of D.C. legends on the movie screen talk about their home town. It was another to see many of them together in the same place again. A little grayer, a little slower and a lot wiser.

A decade before Rosa Parks's arrest for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus, police dragged Bayard Rustin off a bus in Tennessee for the same act of protest. When pressed about why he was resisting segregation, Rustin gestured to a young white boy seated at the front of the bus. “If I sit in the back,” Rustin said, “I am depriving that child of the knowledge that there is injustice here, which I believe is his right to know.”

The Oscars got political again this year, though clearly not in the way many viewers may have preferred. Social media hummed with a cacophony of righteous clicks, but it was a drumbeat of outrage against the night’s master of ceremonies, Seth MacFarlane. Discontent, expressed in 140 characters or less, made a mad cadence down many a timeline before MacFarlane could even get through his performance of “The Boob Song”.

At the corner of Good Hope Road and Martin Luther King Jr. Ave, in Anacostia, a totem pole will rise from a plain patch of vacant ground this spring. It may seem odd that a Native American totem pole was the piece of public art selected by community residents, given that the Native American presence in Anacostia is now negligible, but, historically speaking, it’s fitting.

Teaching my son about the racism he will encounter

Normally I dont' let my 7 year old son, Monday was President’s Day, so my kids didn’t have school. Malcolm, Imani and Sierra (son and daughters) were all downstairs playing the WII, just enjoying their day off while I was laying down watching CNN. Well, on my snack break, I come back to see a very disturbed seven year old staring at the TV screen, in my spot because thats just where he always likes to attempt to sit, with a confused look on his face. Now, I don’t let them watch the news because its just too early for them to hear all of those bad stories of violence, murder, sex, drugs, that typically flood the news stations. By the look on Malcolm’s face I knew that he saw something that greatly disturbed him, so I quickly turned off the TV, and asked him what was wrong.

This weekend The District will be awash in its 1980s go-go and graffiti past. From the tale of its most infamous graffiti artist, to a throwback concert commemorating the city’s rich cultural past, the weekend is sure to remind many about how far the city has come.

Normally I do not let my 7-year-old son Malcolm watch the news. My wife and I believe that it is just too early in his young life to expose him to the complexities of a complicated world. The constant barrage of violence, murder and other inappropriate material can poison the mind of any child, much less one in the second grade.

Normally I do not let my 7-year-old son Malcolm watch the news. My wife and I believe that it is just too early in his young life to expose him to the complexities of a complicated world. The constant barrage of violence, murder and other inappropriate material can poison the mind of any child, much less one in the second grade.