New Report Shows Less Support for Black Nonprofits Since 2020 Racial Reckoning
The Story of How Atlanta Became ‘Black Hollywood’
Black Pastor Charged With Manslaughter After Deadly Backyard Baptism
Chick-fil-A Worker Finds $10K … And Then This Happened
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Daughter of Rodney King Launches ‘I Am a King’ Scholarship to Celebrate Black Fatherhood Just in Time for Father’s Day
For residents of Los Angeles, April 29 is a day that lives on in infamy. Twenty-seven years ago, the streets of the city I now call home descended into chaos in the aftermath of the Rodney King verdict, in which a jury acquitted four LAPD officers of charges related to his brutal assault, which was…
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Live to Tell: 25 Years After Genocide, Miracle in Rwanda Sheds Light on a Tragic Legacy
It’s been 25 years since the civil war that resulted in genocide against the Tutsi tribe of the East African nation of Rwanda. During a three-month period in 1994, as many as one million Rwandans were killed, including approximately 70 percent of the Tutsi population. Among those who lived to tell the massacre was Immaculée…
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NFL Rookie Shot Just Hours After Being Drafted By New York Giants
What should have been the best weekend in one college football player’s life turned into tragedy when he was injured and his college teammate killed in a shooting early Sunday morning at a party in Topeka, Kan. Corey Ballentine, a 23-year-old senior cornerback at Washburn University in Topeka, was the 180th pick in the NFL…
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'God Bless America': Are Supporters of the Kate Smith Version Trying to Protect the Song—or the Singer?
For years, anyone attending a New York Yankees game would be subjected to the voice of Kate Smith singing “God Bless America” during the seventh-inning stretch. Smith, who died in 1986, was heralded in her day as the “Songbird of the South,” an uber popular songstress whose 1938 version of Irving Berlin’s song was so…
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Just Us: These Black Poets Use the Power of Their Words to Highlight Injustice
Editor’s note: This week, for National Poetry Month, we’re featuring 37 up-and-coming black poets—including one today who is much more well-known but in a different field—who we expect do amazing work over the next decade. We grouped them by categories, though their works often blur boundaries and defy definitions. Monday’s theme was Black Regionalism, poets…
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Star Power: Mellody Hobson and George Lucas Vie for Control of Ebony, Jet Photo Archives
Financier Mellody Hobson and her husband, Star Wars movie mogul George Lucas, are taking steps to take control of Ebony and Jet’s massive archive of historic photos, chronicling African-American life over the last seven decades. The archive is uninsured and at risk, as it was used as collateral to secure a $12 million loan to…
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Redlining: The Origin Story of Institutional Racism
To understand racism in America, one must first disabuse themselves of the idea that race is a social construct—an idea that has been created and accepted by the people in a society. Money is a social construct. We accept the idea that a dollar issued by the U.S. government is worth more than Monopoly money.…
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More Than Words: These Poets Aren't Afraid to Mix It Up With Music, Visual Arts to Tell Black Stories
Editor’s note: This week, for National Poetry Month, we’re featuring 37 up-and-coming black poets—including one today who is much more well-known but in a different field—who we expect do amazing work over the next decade. We grouped them by categories, though their works often blur boundaries and defy definitions. Monday’s theme was Black Regionalism, poets…
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Shannon Sharpe Is Dead Serious About HBCUs
Shannon Sharpe has gone viral many times since his 2016 debut on Fox Sports 1’s Skip and Shannon: Undisputed with sportswriter Skip Bayless. Just last year he set Black Twitter abuzz when he appeared on the show with a Black & Mild dangling from his lips, referencing Hennessy as “yak” and “Henn Dog.” Because the…