(The Root) — On March 25, President Barack Obama will designate places honoring Harriet Tubman and Col. Charles Young as national monuments, giving them protection as American treasures worth preserving. According to a statement released by a White House official: President Obama on Monday will sign a Proclamation to designate the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad…

Raising important questions about the demise of the presumption of innocence when today’s black males are involved, the Nation columnist Patricia J. Williams weighs in on the police shooting of 16-year-old Kimani Gray. The only thing anyone can agree upon is that on Saturday, March 9, 16-year-old Kimani Gray was shot seven times by two…

If the GOP wants to change its image, the Rev. Al Sharpton writes at the Huffington Post that members need to start by diversifying their platform, which means getting on the right side of civil right, progress and history. It’s difficult for some to process the fact that my parents were Republicans. But they were,…

A missing New Orleans teacher was seen driving alone in surveillance footage: Terrilyn Monette, who disappeared March 2 after a night out celebrating her Teacher of the Year nomination, was seen driving alone away from a bar on surveillance footage that New Orleans police found, the Huffington Post reports. The Times-Picayune reported that New Orleans…

“People don’t know that a black man [Capt. David B. Kenyon] invented the sliding pole,” Morris Davis, founder of the Chicago African-American Firefighter Museum, told DNAinfo.  Davis, 81, who retired from the Chicago Fire Department in 1992 after 37 years of service, told the site that people don’t seem to know that black firefighters, like…