When I was 20, I decided to hitchhike across the African continent, more or less following the line of the equator, from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic. I packed only one pair of sandals and one pair of jeans to make room for the three hefty books I had decided to read from cover…

I can’t quite believe that it has been 50 years since A Raisin in the Sun opened on Broadway. Like many people, my first encounter with Lorraine Hansberry’s groundbreaking play was through the 1961 film, acted by the original Broadway cast. Because I first saw the film during the black power era, my initial fascination…

2009 marks the 100th anniversary of the modern Civil Rights Movement. In 1909, W.E.B. Du Bois and several black colleagues who had created the Niagara Movement in 1905 joined with a small group of white reformers and civic leaders to form the NAACP. Together, they created the foundation for the greatest movement for civil rights…

Read the washingtonpost.com Live Online discussion: “WAS LINCOLN A RACIST?” with The Root’s editor in chief Henry Louis Gates Jr. ***** I first encountered Abraham Lincoln in Piedmont, W.Va. When I was growing up, his picture was in nearly every black home I can recall, the only white man, other than Jesus himself, to grace black family walls.…

“Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.” —Elizabeth Alexander, “Praise Song for…

A new dawn of American leadership is at hand. President-elect Barack Obama We have all heard stories about those few magical transformative moments in African-American history, extraordinary ritual occasions through which the geographically and socially diverse black community—a nation within a nation, really—molds itself into one united body, determined to achieve one great social purpose…

At 74, Wole Soyinka remains one of democracy’s great champions on the African continent. The adage “criticism, like charity, starts at home,” has long been a favorite truism of the Nobel Prize-winning playwright and political activist. Sadly, there remains much to criticize, as political turmoil, ethnic warfare, graft and corruption continue to plague his home…

James Watson has long assumed a certain special status among American scientists. The molecular biologist was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962, along with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, for, as the Swedish Academy put it in its announcement for the prize, “their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids…

Below are excerpts from the Q&A with Nobel laureate and DNA pioneer James Watson. READ Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s thoughts about this interview in an essay about the science of racism . WATCH portions of this conversation in video. James Watson: I’ve thought about these things a lot over the last couple of months, because…