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Blues Singer Gladys Bentley Broke Ground With Marriage to a Woman in 1931
Editor’s note: For Black History Month, The Root is spotlighting less famous figures from the African American National Biography, whose stories cast a light on hidden or barely remembered episodes from the African-American past. Gladys Bentley, a blues singer and lesbian icon, claimed to have been born in the Caribbean. Appearing on the hit 1950s game show You Bet…
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Explain It Any Way You Want, but Kanye Acted an Ass After the Grammys
It’s true: Kanye is gonna Kanye. So it really shouldn’t surprise anyone that at Sunday night’s E! Grammy after-party, Kanye West told an interviewer—who just happened to be his sister-in-law Khloe Kardashian—that if the Grammys “want real artists to keep coming back, they need to stop playing with us. We ain’t gonna play with them…
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Poll: Obama's Approval Steadily Rising
A slim majority of Americans approve of how President Obama is handling unemployment, according to a new poll conducted by the Associated Press and GfK. It’s great news for Obama, especially since the poll was conducted before the jobs report was released Friday, a report that was “surprisingly strong” and fairly consistent with Americans’ perception…
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How the Concepts of Evil and Darkness Became Linked to African People
This image is part of a weekly series that The Root is presenting in conjunction with the Image of the Black Archive & Library at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. When one is investigating the role of people of African descent in Western art, the results often take surprising turns.…
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Excerpt: New Book Documents Courage of Harriet Tubman and Underground Railroad
Editor’s note: Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and scholar Eric Foner has just published Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad. With new research and documentation, Foner explores the courageous lives of those who helped slaves escape to freedom on the Eastern corridor of the U.S. and describes how their actions affected the Civil…
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Meet 25 Young People Who Will Inspire You and Everyone You Know
Please join us in congratulating the 25 extraordinary young people who have been selected as the 2015 Young Futurists by The Root. It is our tradition to recognize and celebrate African-American men and women, ages 16-22, who are forging a path to future greatness. We choose Black History Month to acknowledge their accomplishments as a…
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In Ferguson—and All of Our Communities—Education Can Be the Great Equalizer
Following Michael Brown’s tragic death, people across the country—and the world—have grieved together and engaged in critical conversations about race and community relationships. When President Barack Obama hosted a dialogue in December with young people on the issues in Ferguson, Mo., I asked the youngest members of the Ferguson commission how I could be helpful.…
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Review: D’Angelo Leaves Harlem’s Apollo Audience Enraptured
After D’Angelo finally dropped his first recording in 14 years, Black Messiah, last December to wide critical acclaim, his fans and the music industry exhaled. On Saturday night at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, the reclusive artist brought his new band, Vanguard, and the sigh of relief became a secular ritual of jubilation for a…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
