In the immediate moments after Cassius Clay shocked the world—defeating notorious bruiser Sonny Liston in Miami Beach, Fla., to win the heavyweight boxing championship in February 1964—he’s joined in the ring by Sam Cooke. Mr. Soul, as Cooke was known, also joined Clay, pro-football great Jim Brown and Malcolm X afterward at the Hampton House…

With Halloween approaching, we’ll soon see a rash of stories about young white college students who feel compelled to apologize for an unfortunate Instagram photo that depicts them in blackface at a campus party. The kind of real-life incidents that inspired the new film Dear White People. Yet despite the ambivalence, awkwardness and, sometimes, revulsion…

What is Michael Jackson’s greatest album? The answer helps establish whether you were introduced to Jackson via Thriller, the crown jewel of his commercial legacy, or whether you were riding with him long before he donned the sequined glove—since Off the Wall, the classic album released 35 years ago this week, that represents Jackson at his…

Two generations before Love & Hip Hop, Bobby Womack’s life could have been a reality television show. The now legendary story of Womack’s marriage to his mentor Sam Cooke’s widow, Barbara, months after Cooke’s shooting death, is just the entry point to a life that was as tragic as it was well lived. To his…

It’s telling that Samuel Bazawule—aka Blitz the Ambassador—was introduced to hip-hop as a child in Ghana via the music of Public Enemy. While “Niggas in Paris” like Kanye West and Jay Z are most often recalled in fantasies and nightmares of hip-hop’s global expansion, rappers have been in the vanguard of a black cosmopolitan identity…

The ghost of Michael Jackson appeared during Sunday night’s broadcast of the Billboard Music Awards, but the holographic stunt pales in comparison to the actual ghost of Jackson that still haunts the vaults at Sony Music. Or so Timothy “Timbaland” Mosley might say, expressing in the 20-minute making-of video that accompanies the digital release of…

Juxtaposed with news coverage in recent weeks about the horrifying abduction of hundreds of Nigerian schoolgirls is the sheer volume of national media attention devoted to Donald Sterling’s garden-variety racist rants—a positioning that seems, frankly, absurd. The girls’ story is thankfully starting to get traction, but too often in mainstream media, coverage of critical news…

April 8 marks the 40th anniversary of Henry Aaron passing Babe Ruth as the major league’s career leader in home runs. It was one of the most significant sports feats of the 20th century, and like many others—heavyweight Joe Louis’ defeat of Max Schmeling in 1938 and Jesse Owens’ four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics in…

I had my annual physical examination a few days ago, and upon checking my vitals—my blood pressure score, as I’m telling everybody, was 118/72—my doctor, a 60-something white woman, jokingly remarked, “Love it when my peeps are doing well.” And though in many other settings her attempt at colloquial bonding might have been met with…

I’m sure I’m not the only one who enjoyed the Coors Light beer ads that featured the O’Jays’ classic recording, “Love Train.” But I’m sure many folks would also be curious as to how that song—one of the great anthems recorded on the Philadelphia International Records label—ended up in a commercial for a company whose…