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How the AME Church Helped Build My Armor of Values
Even though I can’t physically be at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., for Friday’s funeral service, I am there in spirit—through a connection planted deep in my soul from an early age. My father, Charles, and grandfather, known as Shep in an abbreviation of his middle name Shepherd, were both pastors at the AME Church. My…
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The Death of a Friend Inspires Reflections on Mortality
Something there is about the death of a friend or colleague close to your own age that makes you contemplate your own mortality. It happened to me several years ago when my good friend Ed Bradley passed, and it seems to be happening more frequently now as I am fully ensconced in my 70s. On…
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School a Beacon of Hope in Nigeria
(The Root) — Whenever northern Nigeria has been in the news in recent months, the stories are usually about killings and kidnappings by Boko Haram — a radical Islamist insurgency group that has killed some 2,000 people and kidnapped others in the region since its emergence in 2002. The slayings included several people killed during…
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Remembering Bravery in Birmingham
In a piece for the New Yorker, Charlayne Hunter-Gault chronicles the day in 1963 when children as young as 6 marched in Birmingham, Ala., to protest segregation. One of the Children’s Crusaders was Janice Wesley Kelsey, who was in the eleventh grade when she was arrested along with hundreds of other students. She spent four…
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Well Done, John Lewis. Well Done
(Special to The Root) — Charlayne Hunter-Gault delivered the following remarks on April 4, 2013, at the Allen Prize Symposium at Georgia Tech University in Atlanta, where Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) received the Ivan Allen Jr. Prize for Social Courage. The first time I heard Barack Obama say that he stood on the shoulders of…
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Will the Pistorius Case Change South Africa?
In a piece at the New Yorker, Charlayne Hunter-Gault writes that the shooting death of model Reeva Steenkamp, allegedly by South Africa’s star runner Oscar Pistorius, shines a light on some of the darker facts of life for so many South Africans: domestic abuse. Sometimes a murder manages to shine a light on a particular…
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MLK, Obama and Our Kids' Education
Writing at Beccastone, Charlayne Hunter-Gault says black children must understand that, like Martin Luther King Jr., the legions of young people who walked with him, and Barack Obama, they have no choice but to get an education. As I was preparing to attend the second inauguration of Barack Obama, I kept thinking how appropriate that…
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Ethiopian PM Dies: Will Press Freedom Live?
(The Root) — The news this week that Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi died — of a “sudden infection,” according to state TV — did not exactly come as a shock. For weeks there were rumors that he was ailing. When I was in Washington, D.C., recently, taking cabs to and from the Convention Center…
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Ethiopian Journalist Gets 18 Years in Prison
(The Root) — It could be said that the Ethiopian journalist Eskinder Nega dodged a bullet when he was sentenced to only 18 years in prison. After all, the charge of terrorism against him could have brought a death sentence or life in prison, as was the case with 23 other defendants — journalists, as…
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Can Freedom of Press Happen in Ethiopia?
(Special to The Root) — After a reunion a few weeks ago in New York with Serkalem Fasil, an Ethiopian journalist and former publisher whose husband Eskinder Nega, also a journalist, is in prison on terrorism charges, I vowed to go to Ethiopia and plead with the government for his release, along with that of…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
