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Why Did My Ancestor Change the Family Name?
My last name is Stradwick. However, my late grandfather, Thomas Stradwick, said that was not our family’s original surname. He said his father, James, changed his last name to Stradwick, for reasons unknown, before he married my great-grandmother Lilly Ferguson of South Carolina. But what he changed his last name from is the mystery. My…
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How the Communal Experience of Music Has Changed
Left of Black host Mark Anthony Neal sits down with Professor Guthrie Ramsey Jr. to talk about how music today is made, shared and studied. Ramsey is the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania and recently published The Amazing Bud Powell: Black Genius, Jazz History, and…
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It’s Time to Quit Operating on CP Time
I received this text message from a dear friend of mine last weekend: “You usually don’t ask dumb questions. But this will go down as one of them.” She was responding to a text I’d just sent, asking her a pretty innocent question. It was certainly one that on the surface wouldn’t seem to elicit such…
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Looking Back on ‘Bloody Sunday’ in Selma
This week marks the 49th anniversary of one of the most important events in American history. It began on March 7, 1965, when Alabama state troopers routed peaceful demonstrators on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, which was dedicated on Monday as a national landmark. The violence that engulfed the nonviolent, overwhelmingly black cadre of…
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Your Threats to Leave Won’t Stop Your Husband’s Infidelities
My husband has cheated on me a couple of times. I told him if anything happens ever again, I’m going to divorce him. My heart is broken, and I have nightmares about this chick. I don’t know how to trust him. I love him and want it to work, but I don’t know how this…
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Jim Brown Says Slavery Wasn’t So Bad. And That’s Bad News for the GOP
It’s been well-documented that the GOP is in the middle of an aggressive rebranding campaign intended to woo African-American voters, and in the midst of this, yet another Republican congressional candidate has provoked cries of racial insensitivity. In a post on his Facebook page that was—in theory, anyway—about federal spending, Jim Brown, who’s running in…
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‘What I Wore When Sexually Assaulted’: Women of Twitter Report
Twitter user @Steenfox—real name Christine Fox—was still reeling Wednesday evening from an earlier online debate with a follower who insisted that women’s revealing attire could be a contributing factor to sexual assault. “I was trying to make him understand that it absolutely does not make a difference, and that the responsibility does not lie on…
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Quote of the Day: Jackie Robinson on Willpower
You can read this quote by Jackie Robinson, from an interview with Time magazine, in Bartlett’s Familiar Black Quotations. Read more about Robinson here. Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and founding director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He is also the editor-in-chief of The Root. Follow him…
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Black Techies Represent at SXSW
On March 8 and 9, SXSW, also known as South by Southwest—the popular interactive, music and film conference held every year in Austin, Texas—featured a pitch competition for tech start-ups. The prestigious competition allows the burgeoning firms to gain further exposure. We’ve highlighted four start-ups with co-founders who are of African descent. 1. Ricardo Rodriguez, Qlovi…
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The Last Black Mayor of Chocolate City?
In awkwardly timed remarks 24 hours after dramatic campaign-corruption allegations were leveled against him, Washington, D.C., Mayor Vincent Gray defied rumors of his political death spiral. “I did not break the law,” pronounced the mayor to a very pro-Gray crowd of several hundred this past Tuesday night, who complimented the moment with stand-up chants of…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
