Actress Danièle Watts took to social media last week to condemn the Los Angeles Police Department after she was allegedly mistaken for a prostitute after kissing her white husband, Identites.mic reports. According to Facebook posts by Watts and her husband, Brian James Lucas, two police officers mistook the couple for a prostitute and client Thursday when they…

Benjamin Crump, the lawyer for the family of slain Ferguson, Mo., teen Michael Brown, blasted the St. Louis Post-Dispatch Friday for reporting “gossip and racist speculation,” according to CNN. Crump accused the paper of failing to apply the same zeal to obtaining background information about Darren Wilson, the Ferguson police officer who shot Brown, that…

The death of a mentally ill inmate in a 101-degree-Fahrenheit cell at New York City’s Rikers Island jail has been ruled accidental, the New York Daily News reports. Jerome Murdough, 56, a former U.S. Marine, died Feb. 15 of hyperthermia due to “environmental exposure to heat,” a spokeswoman for the city’s chief medical examiner said,…

Police in Lake Mary, Fla., are investigating an allegation that George Zimmerman threatened to kill a motorist during a road rage incident, CBS Miami reports. A man who identified himself only as “Matt’ called police Tuesday to report that a truck pulled up alongside him and a passenger yelled, “Why are you pointing a finger…

Minnesota Vikings running back Adrian Peterson was booked into jail and released on $15,000 bail early Saturday morning after he was indicted on a felony charge of reckless or negligent injury to a child, ESPN reports. Peterson reportedly beat his 4-year-old son earlier this year with a small tree branch as a form of punishment,…

On Monday The Root will give readers the chance to vote for the greatest black TV shows of all time. For the next three weeks, readers will choose from a roster of shows—from comedies to dramas, old and new—that captured the collective experiences of being black in America. The top 50 shows that readers choose will be…

In season 40 of Saturday Night Live, which begins Sept. 27, viewers will witness history when 30-year-old stand-up comedian Michael Che becomes the co-anchor of “Weekend Update,” the first African American to hold the position. Che may be familiar to fans of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he had a short run as…

It was only 50 years ago when the architect of the March on Washington, Bayard Rustin, a black gay man, stood next to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as he recited his famous “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. While Rustin’s sexual orientation was known within his activists’ circles, it…

Celebrated South African Paralympian Oscar Pistorius has been convicted of culpable homicide. He was found not guilty of premeditated murder on Thursday but later found guilty of the lesser charge for firing four shots into a locked bathroom door, killing his girlfriend, model Reeva Steenkamp, last year on Valentine’s Day. Now Pistorius faces five to…