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Ex-SC Cop Who Hurled Black Student Over Desk Won’t Face Criminal Charges
The South Carolina police officer who was fired for violently dragging a young black girl across a classroom over use of a cellphone will not face criminal charges. The New York Daily News reports that Richland County Solicitor Dan Johnson said in a 12-page court report Friday that he found no probable cause to charge…
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5 Queer Black Female Authors Who Will Blow Your Mind Wide Open
Hashtags like #BrownGirlMagic, #BlackGirlsRock and #CareFreeBlackGirl represent a movement of self-definition led by black women for black women. A self-definition that seeks to motivate, push and create space for black women to stand up straight in the crooked room that is America’s commitment to distorted and backward portrayals of black women’s humanity. Similarly, stories written…
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Breast-Feeding: It's Not All It's Cracked Up to Be
I do not like breast-feeding. There, I said it. I’d been feeling like I couldn’t say it until I finally blurted it out the other night in a bout of frustration. My baby was going through her first growth spurt, which meant that she was feeding around the clock. Newborns tend to feed every one-and-a-half…
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7 Arguments I Wish People Would Stop Using to Defend Their Favorite Celebrities
I spend a great deal of my day trying to figure out what to write about for my next story. Luckily for me, there’s rarely a day that passes without a hot-button issue being debated on one of my many social media timelines. Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve spent a great deal of…
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Is My Family’s ‘Slave Name’ the Wrong One?
I have been working on my family tree for years and cannot find anyone on my father’s side earlier than my great-grandparents Texas Williams, 1871-1951, and his wife, Nettie Howard Williams, 1875-1912. My father said that Texas always said that they were really “Dunns”—that the Dunn family sold them to the Williams family and they…
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JetBlue Puts 5-Year-Old on Wrong Flight
Andy Martinez Mercado, 5, was returning home to New York City after visiting with his family in the Dominican Republic when he was put on the wrong flight, ending up in Boston, the New York Daily News reports. It took over three hours to locate Andy after it was discovered that he was missing. “I thought he…
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The Military Isn’t a Monolith: An Open Letter From an Active Duty Officer to Colin Kaepernick
Dear Colin, Your decision to stage a silent protest against racial injustice by remaining seated during the national anthem is one of great courage and intestinal fortitude. Your protest and follow-up comments have been met with excessively vitriolic reactions, including condemnation by members of the military on whose behalf detractors purport to castigate you. Members…
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Aaliyah’s One in a Million and the Power Players Behind the Music: Where Are They Now?
The year 1996 was arguably the hottest in the ’90s for black popular culture. Tupac released his classic album All Eyez on Me, and just months later, he was gunned down in Las Vegas. Jay Z dropped Reasonable Doubt, launching a career that would see him rise from a street hustler to “a business, man.”…
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Texas Death Row Inmate May Have Faked Mental Illness
Gerald Eldridge, 52, may have faked having an illness to avoid execution after fatally shooting his ex-girlfriend Cynthia Bogany and her daughter in Houston 23 years ago, the Associated Press reports. Eldridge was convicted in 1993, and in 2009, when he was less than two hours away from being executed by lethal injection, U.S. District…
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Woman Sets Herself on Fire in Congressman’s Office
At about 3 p.m. on Tuesday, a woman walked into Democratic U.S. Rep. Danny Davis’ office on the West Side of Chicago, drank from a bottle of hand sanitizer, poured the sanitizer over herself and proceeded to set herself on fire with a lighter, CBS News reports. The reasons behind her actions are unclear, and…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
