• White Teacher Reinstated After Blackface Lesson

    A Michigan middle school teacher’s suspension for teaching his eighth-grade class about blackface has ended after almost two weeks. Alan Barron returned to his job at Monroe Middle School on Monday, CBS Detroit reports. Barron, 59, was showing his class a video about how white entertainers used to put on blackface to imitate black people.…

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  • Angela Bassett to Direct Movie About Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown

    Whitney Houston’s story—more specifically, her troubled relationship with singer-songwriter Bobby Brown—is due to be chronicled in a Lifetime movie scheduled for release in 2015. Award-winning actress Angela Bassett will make her directing debut with Whitney Houston, telling the story of the couple from “the time they first met at the very height of their celebrity,…

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  • Meet the Black Officer Who Went Undercover as a KKK Member

    Sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction. Retired police Sgt. Ron Stallworth’s story—about how he, a black undercover Colorado cop, infiltrated one of the nation’s most notorious hate groups in 1978—is one such truth. Stallworth, 61, recently released the book Black Klansman, detailing his amazing story during his early years of service. “I was sitting…

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  • Ras Baraka Elected Mayor of Newark

    On Tuesday night, Newark, N.J., elected its new mayor, Municipal Council member Ras Baraka—and chose a new direction for itself, the New York Times reports. Baraka, the son of activist and poet Amiri Baraka, won approximately 54 percent of the vote, with 96 percent of the precincts reporting. His opponent, Seton Hall School of Law…

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  • Boko Haram Releases New Video Allegedly Showing Missing Nigerian Schoolgirls

    The Boko Haram terrorist cell released a video on Monday claiming to show the kidnapped schoolgirls from Chibok in Borno state, Nigeria. In the video, some hundred girls were shown wearing full-length hijab and praying. In the video, Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau said that the girls had been “liberated” and are Muslim now. He…

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  • A Mother’s Love: Stories of Struggle, Sacrifice, Love and Wisdom

    It’s Mother’s Day weekend, and many of us may feel the keen absence of the women who meant the most to us. How many times have you wished you could turn back the hands of time and have one more conversation with one of the most influential women of your life? Maybe have notes of…

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  • Meet the 19-Year-Old Whose Racism Prank Fooled the Net

    When the video broke it shook the Internet. It was an unbelievably horrifying depiction of overt racism with a white man insisting that a black woman move to the back of the bus where she belonged, much to the horror of everyone else on the Brooklyn, N.Y., bus. In cellphone footage posted online, the white…

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  • Jet Magazine to Stop Print Publication and Go Digital 

    Jet magazine will be bidding farewell to the newsstand, for the most part, moving forward with plans to transition into a digital magazine—available as an app—at the end of June, Johnson Publishing Co. announced Wednesday. The black magazine, founded in the early 1950s as a popular news source for black people to get information about…

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  • Not Enough Drugs Entered Inmate’s Veins in Botched Okla. Execution

    Updated Friday, May 2, 2014, 2 p.m. EDT: President Barack Obama called the botched exeuction “deeply troubling” while at a White House press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, NBC News reports.   Obama said that the mishandled execution raised “significant questions about how the death penalty is being applied” in the nation, adding that he…

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  • Columbus Short Ransacked Home, Wife Claims

    Columbus Short’s name isn’t going to be free of controversy anytime soon, with his wife claiming that the scandal-ridden actor broke into their house over Easter weekend and left it in disarray, TMZ reports. Tanee McCall-Short (also known as Tuere in the U.S.) claims in new court documents that Columbus Short entered the house—despite a…

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