Even if the recent headlines about Mathew Knowles allegedly pilfering Beyoncé’s profits are true, any potential conflict that could arise during a Carter-Knowles gathering would cease the minute Mathew appeared with a bucket of Popeye’s chicken — Bey’s favorite — as a peace offering. Unfortunately for Jay-Z, Solange and Tina, she probably wouldn’t share. Captions…

In her important book Congo Square: African Roots in New Orleans, historian Freddi Williams Evans has documented the history of Congo Square, a site in New Orleans where records from the early 1700s document that freed and enslaved Africans gathered to share and perpetuate traditional African cultural practices. Today that square still exists, just outside…

Category: Noteworthy  Chris Hedges’ May 16, 2011, interview with Princeton professor Cornel West on truthdig.com lit a powder keg among black academics with this now infamous quote by West: “I think my dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men. It’s understandable. As a young brother who grows up in a…

From Chicago, Lawrence was selected by the Air Force for astronaut training in 1967. He died a short time later in the crash of an F-104 fighter jet while instructing a student pilot at the controls. Lawrence, who held a Ph.D. in chemistry from Ohio State University, never got to fulfill his dream, but he…

Race is undeniably felt on a social level, but biologically the concept doesn’t hold up. This discrepancy is illustrated in a new exhibit at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, “RACE: Are We So Different?” A traveling project of the American Anthropological Association in collaboration with the Science Museum of Minnesota, the exhibit explores…

My dad would put me in front of the TV and give me grits and tell me I was going to get in touch with my black side while I was at his house on the weekends. —Jenée Desmond-Harris, contributing editor My sisters and I would watch and argue over which dancer we got to…

The Somali supermodel and businesswoman was set up with British rock royalty David Bowie by their shared hairdresser. “It was nerve-racking at the beginning, the first five minutes, but we got along very famously, and we have been together since then,” she said in an interview. The power couple walked down the aisle in 1992…

Aug. 7, 1930Marion, Ind.Inscribed in pencil on the inner, gray matte: “Bo pointn to his niga.” On the yellowed outer matte: “klan 4th Joplin, Mo. 33.” Flattened between the glass and double mattes are locks of the victims’ hair. “Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America” was organized by the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in…

The center of black life in Tulsa in the early 1900s, Greenwood Avenue was dubbed the Black Wall Street. Captions by Gary Lee Present-day Greenwood Avenue, Tulsa. Thriving black-owned businesses lined the streets in the 1910s. After three days of rioting in late May and early June 1921, black Tulsa was in ruins. With approximately…

Conducting the show’s first interview with a sitting president and first lady: impressive. Doing it just hours after Obama’s press conference releasing his long-form birth certificate, and days before his announcement that American forces had killed Osama bin Laden: even better. Our favorite quote came from Michelle: “I always told the voters, the question is…