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Jurnee Smollett-Bell Makes Vampire Debut
Actress Jurnee Smollett-Bell jumped into action when she found out she was being considered for a role on the hit HBO series True Blood. In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Smollett-Bell said that she and her husband shot an impromptu audition video in her in-laws’ basement to convince producers that she had what it takes…
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Allen Iverson's Ex-Wife: He Abducted Our Kids
In the ongoing saga that is Allen Iverson’s life, his ex-wife, Tawanna Iverson, has filed papers accusing the former Philadelphia 76er of abducting their children. He has yet to return them to her after taking them on vacation on May 22, according to Sports Illustrated. Tawanna Iverson filed papers that said Allen asked for permission…
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Single Black Dad: You Can't Take My Child
(The Root) — Within the span of three weeks, two public officials went above and beyond their immediate duties to help Chad Milner gain custody of his 9-month-old daughter. An officer in a Virginia sheriff’s department gave Milner (then 26, and a recent Morehouse College graduate) off-the-record advice about what he needed to do to…
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Flavorful Fatherhood: Black Celeb Dads
Reading bedtime stories to his daughter so that she would fall asleep did not work in the Jackson household. In an audio recording on YouTube, the actor describes how he used “colorful” language to his daughter Zoe, now 30, to close up shop for the night. “I did say, ‘Go the f—k to sleep’ to…
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Racist Testimony in Death-Penalty Case Inspires New Doc
The new documentary A Broken Promise in Texas: Race, the Death Penalty and the Duane Buck Case, released by the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, sheds light on the 1997 Texas death-penalty trial of Duane Buck, an African-American man who was convicted of shooting three people, two of whom died. The controversy: Jurors listened…
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Meet Compton's New Black Female Mayor
Aja Brown, 31, was just named the mayor of Compton, Calif., in a special runoff election on Tuesday, June 4. The Los Angeles Times reports that Brown, an African-American urban planner and graduate of the University of South Carolina, was up against Omar Bradley, a former two-term mayor and leading political figure in Compton. Analysts…
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First Lady and Kerry Washington Push for the Arts
(The Root) — Students from the Savoy Elementary School in Washington, D.C., crooned, somersaulted, Lindy Hopped and re-enacted scenes from the 1970s film Grease on Friday as a way to flex their school’s new muscles in arts education. They performed in the gym to an audience of their peers and two distinguished ladies cheering in…
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Michael Jackson: The Writings on the Wall
Michael Jackson’s songwriting accolades are long overdue. For many, his extant death prompted scores of self-professed music connoisseurs to disinter a body of work that exhibited a ”mean pen game”—a contemporary colloquialism suggesting a profound writing ability. This skill is not readily associated with Jackson for several reasons. For the most part, his records were…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
