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Arthur Ashe Won Wimbledon 38 Years Ago Today
July 5, 1975, is a noteworthy day in the annals of black sports. It was when Arthur Ashe became the first black man to win Wimbledon, according to Sports Mole, which reports that it was all the more incredible that the 31-year-old Ashe was up against 22-year-old Jimmy Connors, the title holder at the time.…
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DOMA and Voting Rights Don't Compare
(The Root) — Who is the most privileged among the least privileged? That’s the question many are asking as Americans discuss how the Supreme Court treated race-centered cases over the Voting Rights Act and affirmative action versus cases over same-sex marriage. Are African Americans and other people of color, who are the most likely to face…
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There's a Little 'Mary Jane' in All of Us
Blogging at For Harriett, Tyler Young writes that BET’s Being Mary Jane will likely become a hit because the character’s story is familiar to so many women of color, who are trying to do their best while confronting life’s challenges. … I am not sure who’s been peeping inside my window at night but it has got to…
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Enough With the Texting; Let's Talk!
Happily single Roxanne Jones, a founding editor of ESPN the Magazine, writes at CNN that while it may be cute for teenagers to text their sweethearts all day and night, that’s really no way for intelligent, confident adults to communicate. She says real men talk — they do not text. As a happily single woman,…
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Vintage Black Beauty
(The Root) — These are pictures you rarely see in your American-history books: black women dressed to the nines, swaddled head to toe in glamour, getting married, going to parties or just holding their children. The Tumblr Vintage Black Beauties provides a look at everyday women being beautiful, every day. Old pictures of nonfamous black…
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Supreme Court's Voting-Rights Decision: Democracy Will Suffer
In a piece at NorthJersey.com, Mark C. Alexander, a professor at Seton Hall University School of Law, writes that by gutting the Voting Rights Act, the Supreme Court has spun a mythical America that is not representative of the world in which we live. He says “their foray into fantasy does damage that may not be…
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How Do I Research My Fulani Roots?
(The Root) — “I have both maternal and paternal DNA test done by African Ancestry.com. The two tribes indicated in the results point to my maternal roots being Fulani and my paternal roots Ibo, both from Nigeria. Can you suggest which records/archives I can continue my search? “My mother had a middle name she did…
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Quote of the Day: Shirley Chisholm on Health
Read about research that was inspired by this quote here. Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research at Harvard University. He is also the editor-in-chief of The Root. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.
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Black American Pride: Marcia Anderson
(The Root) — A lot has changed since 1903, when W.E.B. Du Bois described black Americans as possessing what he called a “double consciousness,” caught between a self-conception as Americans and as people of African descent. As he put it in The Souls of Black Folk: “The Negro ever feels his two-ness-an American, a Negro;…
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Twitter on Jay-Z's New Album and That Other Magna Carta
(The Root) — Jay-Z’s new album, Magna Carta Holy Grail, dropped today, and the cool new thing to do on Twitter is to assume that people don’t know what the real Magna Carta is. Because, you know, hip-hop fans aren’t smart enough to know historical tidbits. They’re all too busy smoking weed and robbing liquor…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
