Malachi Kirby has snagged the biggest role of his budding career: portraying the iconic Kunta Kinte in the updated version of Alex Haley’s epic, Roots. More than 100 million Americans—more than half the United States and nearly 85 percent of all TV households—watched the Roots finale on Jan. 30, 1977. The original Roots made LeVar…

Like Viola Davis, another great actress from the stage, Anika Noni Rose is finally being recognized for her great talent outside of theater. The latest example of this is her anchoring role as Kizzy in the History Channel’s ambitious Roots reboot. The Root caught up with Rose to talk about her initial reservations regarding the…

Even Undercover Boss fans would be hard-pressed to recall any show where the “boss” was black, let alone from the Caribbean. But on Sunday, May 22, Lowell Hawthorne, President/CEO of Golden Krust Caribbean Bakery & Grill, the nation’s largest manufacturer, distributor and franchisor of Caribbean baked products and largest Caribbean-owned business, changes that. In 1989, Hawthorne,…

With its new series, Inside the Label, BET has put its own spin on the music-genre series popularized by VH1’s Behind the Music and TV One’s Unsung by spotlighting the business and creative synergy behind the music that so many of us love. To kick off its first installment, the docuseries looked to Uptown Records,…

Nate Moore has achieved a “marvel” feat of his own: going from reading comics as a kid to landing as executive producer alongside Marvel mastermind Stan Lee himself for the iconic brand’s latest global smash, Captain America: Civil War. While I was in there, I was able, with Nicole Perlman [first woman to write a Marvel…

“I grew up in one of those households where every month was Black History Month,” W. Kamau Bell jokes. Bell, one of the few comedians tackling issues of race head-on, credits his heightened awareness to his highly conscious mother who grew up in Indiana in the worst of times. “She had just embedded this inside…

Just days before Nina hits theaters in a limited release, Zoe Saldana joined Nina producer Stuart Parr and Al Schackman—musical director for the iconic Nina Simone from 1957 until her death in 2003—for an intimate post-screening conversation Tuesday in Atlanta, where she is filming Guardians of the Galaxy 2. The conversation, led by television news executive…

Barbershop: The Next Cut, starring Ice Cube and Cedric the Entertainer as barbers on the South Side of Chicago (the third installment of the franchise), is probably a lot funnier than most people expect, thanks in part to Tracy Oliver. The Stanford-educated, South Carolina native first got our attention as Nina, the work nemesis of…

Whenever Larenz Tate is mentioned, it’s hard not to think of Menace II Society, Love Jones, Dead Presidents and The Inkwell. Throughout the 1990s he was a constant big-screen presence. In the 2000s he’s been a presence as well, just a slightly less brash one. On cable he most notably held his own in FX’s…

If you watched The Carmichael Show when it premiered this past summer, you know it doesn’t play it safe. Still, many who are now enjoying the show’s second season were surprised to see the comedy loosely based on comedian Jerrod Carmichael’s own life tackling charged issues like allegations of sexual assault against Bill Cosby and…