(The Root) — To borrow a line from the movie Ray, when you “make it do what it do,” people will come out and show you love. And that’s exactly what happened for Jermaine Dupri during his So So Def 20th Anniversary Concert Saturday night at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta. Dupri may not be…

Fresh from our WTH files: a report out of North Dakota that three students were photographed wearing Ku Klux Klan-style robes and hoods at a state semifinal hockey game. The students, who attend Red River High School in Grand Forks, were seated in the stands on Friday night to watch their school play against Davies…

Michelle Obama multitasks at Governors’ Dinner and then the Oscars on Sunday: For the evening, the first lady wore Naeem Khan, choosing a strapless silver design that perfectly complemented her blunt bangs, the Huffington Post reports. The first lady’s second-term swagger is simply marvelous. Voting Rights Act “bailout provision” could play an outsize role in…

Monday, Feb. 25, 1:19 p.m. EST: One year later: Trayvon Martin’s mother pushes for change in “Stand your ground” laws: On Monday’s edition of Tell Me More, Sybrina Fulton tells host Michel Martin that what happened to her son should not be “about black and white.” She hopes for justice, not only in her son’s…

(The Root) — On Monday, CEO Steve Hannah posted a rare apology on behalf of the staff members who called 9-year-old best actress nominee Quvenzhané Wallis the c-word in a tweet from its official Twitter account during the broadcast of the 85th Academy Awards on Sunday. “It was crude and offensive — not to mention…

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar writes at Esquire that while he was entertained by Quentin Tarantino’s slavery-themed Western Django Unchained, he doesn’t agree that the film deserved an Academy Award nomination. First, let’s get this straight: I liked Django Unchained and have been recommending it to everyone. It’s gritty and lively and filled with entertaining scenes. It zigs when…

Marc Lamont Hill weighs in on Ebony on the ramifications of casting actress Zoe Saldana as Nina Simone in the upcoming biopic and what it says about Hollywood’s casting culture. But even if Saldana manages to look like Simone, it still leaves another question: Why not just hire a dark-skinned actress? Surely, this is what…

As we near the one-year anniversary of Trayvon Martin’s death on Feb. 26, Children’s Defense Fund president Marian Wright Edelman echoes Harry Belafonte’s recent call for action on the Huffington Post, discussing the number of gun deaths in the black community. Shortly after President Kennedy’s assassination, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote that it was…

Otis “Damon” Harris, a former member of the Temptations, lost his long battle with prostate cancer this week, reports Billboard. He was 62. Born in 1950, Harris joined Motown hitmakers The Temptations at age 21 in 1971 after a stint in a Temptations cover band called the Young Tempts with high school friends. The young…

At Emory University, where President James Wagner recently championed the three-fifths compromise, in which slaves were deemed less than human as a “pragmatic” way to save the union, the fallout continues, reports the New York Times. More recently, the school dealt with a fraternity that flew a Confederate flag and an anthropology professor who used…