-
That Time Jackie Robinson Was a Columnist for the Pittsburgh Courier
With Ken Burns’ two-part Jackie Robinson PBS documentary looming this month, Negro-newspaper sportswriters will return to black America’s consciousness. The Negro press of 1945 to 1948 not only advocated for the desegregation of Major League Baseball but also, for Jackie Robinson’s and the race’s sake, became the de facto public relations wing of his team,…
-
Alex Haley, Roots and the Enduring Power of Black Myth
Kunta Kinte now joins USS Enterprise Capt. James Tiberius Kirk and Sherlock Holmes in the growing worldwide popular-culture club of the 21st-century reboot. I was shocked to learn that Roots is being remade and will be broadcast Memorial Day on three different networks: History, Lifetime and A&E. A Roots redux astounds me, because the original…
-
Democracy in Black: 3 Writers Wrestle With President Obama’s Blackness
The shade that one Black Lives Matter activist threw President Barack Obama Thursday while declining an invitation to a White House Black History Month event only seemed surprising to those not paying attention. During both of Obama’s terms, and even before, a visible minority of black activists—some prominent, some not, and from different age groups—have…
-
Antonin Scalia’s Death Opens Up a Supreme Court Seat, and the Republicans Want to Keep It That Way
Antonin Scalia, the hard-core conservative U.S. Supreme Court justice who said, among other things, that blacks might want to attend “slower” schools because they may do better there, died Saturday morning, just hours before the Republican presidential candidates pledged at a debate that if they got to be president, they would put somebody on the…
-
In Gratitude for Maurice White, the Spirit Leader of Earth, Wind & Fire
Born of the Earth are Nature’s children Fed by the wind, the breath of life Judged by the fiery hands of God —Earth, Wind & Fire from the 1976 song “Spirit” The white album that I grew up with did not belong to the Beatles. As a child in the 1970s, fiddling around in the…
-
The End Equals the Beginning: There Is No Black America, Says the President
Tuesday night looked so good, I almost didn’t pay attention to what President Barack Obama was saying. I did notice that he morphed back into his 2004 happy-warrior persona, attempting to tie a yellow ribbon around a country containing a substantial white population that will hate his Muslim, gun-removing, socialism-promoting presidency to his dying breath.…
-
Will Howard University’s TV Station Be Auctioned Off to the FCC?
Howard University President Wayne A.I. Frederick is considering auctioning WHUT—the university’s public television station, and for 35 years the only black-owned public television station in the United States—to the Federal Communications Commission for anywhere between an estimated $100 million and $500 million, according to a universitywide memorandum released Friday. The channel’s broadcast spectrum, containing both…
-
History in the Making: Million Man March 20th Anniversary
Updated Saturday, Oct. 10, 6 p.m. EDT: Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan’s call for an economic boycott of Christmas was the “or else” in the “Justice or Else” theme of the 20th-anniversary Million Man March on Saturday. He said that the mass action could serve as a wake-up call for whites, who he said…
-
The Million Man March: On the Bus
On the floor by my bed is one of the books that made me a journalist: Sylvester Monroe and Peter Goldman’s Brothers. (Goldman, I would learn later, wrote the biography The Death and Life of Malcolm X.) The book told the stories of black men struggling to survive in Chicago and beyond. I moved it…
-
50 Years Later, The Autobiography of Malcolm X Is Still a Must-Read
“You know that devil’s not going to print that!” That is what Malcolm X, a minister in the Nation of Islam, said to a freelance writer named Alex Haley in 1963 as they sat in a Nation of Islam restaurant in Harlem. Haley and Malcolm spent a large part of several days in that restaurant,…
