culture
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#TheRootTrip: Treat Yo’ Self at Atlanta’s Iwi Fresh Garden Day Spa
I wanna make this clear: Iwi Fresh Garden Day Spa at 341 Nelson St. SW in Atlanta is one of the best black-owned businesses I’ve ever visited. Point blank. What makes it the best? A number of things. Owner Yolanda Owens is a cool and beautiful sister (Alpha Kappa Alpha member, by the way) who’s…
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Megyn Kelly’s Interview With Alex Jones Was a Waste of Everyone’s Time
Megyn Kelly is full of shit. If there’s anyone who knows that in today’s media climate, simply seeking to “expose” a propagandist is typically a fool’s errand, it would be the former host of a Fox News prime-time show. So when Kelly released a statement in response to criticism over her choice to interview the…
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Everybody’s Queen Sugar Bae, Kofi Siriboe, Is Trolling All of Us
Kofi Siriboe is easily the bae of anyone who is attracted to the male species. Kofi knows he’s bae. Kofi also loves black women, fully, unapologetically and relentlessly. It’s clear in the way he treats his momager (who happens to be a friend of mine), Koshie Mills. When he speaks to her, his voice is…
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#TheRootTrip: A Former Tourist Home in SC Has Literally Gone to the (Dead) Dogs
Yeah, so lemme tell you about my trip to Greenville, S.C. My task was to find the Dr. Gibbs Tourist Home, located at 914 Anderson Road, and I was excited because I thought that if this person was a doctor, I was pretty sure that he or she would have a pretty impressive home that…
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#TheRootTrip: Former Tourist Home in Atlanta Retains Some Signs of Its Past Glory
In the 1957 Negro Motorist Green Book, the Connally Tourist Home is located just a block away from Morris Brown College in Atlanta and is a multistory home that was common in the late 19th century. But I was interested in it because it was the first tourist home on this trip that I could…
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#TheRootTrip: In Atlanta, a Mystery. Who Was Ma Sutton?
In the short time that I have to research these Green Book spots, the hardest ones tend to be those that were owned by black women. Even when they’re called “famous” or dubbed as “must visits” in historical documents, the details about the lives of these female entrepreneurs are often either lost or hard to…
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#TheRootTrip: Ga. on My Mind
Another night on the road, another black-owned hotel stay. This time it was the Hilton Garden Inn Atlanta North/Alpharetta in Alpharetta, Ga., right outside of Atlanta. And yet again, the property is owned by the Capstone Development Group. But Atlanta has a few black-owned hotel options, including properties owned by Robert Johnson (founder and former…
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#TheRootTrip: Chillin’ in Style in Birmingham, Ala.
More chillin’ at a black-owned hotel! This one is the Residence Inn by Marriott Birmingham Downtown at the University of Alabama-Birmingham at 821 20th St. South, and it’s another property held by the black-owned Capstone Development Investment Group. Back in 2013, the group purchased this seven-story, 129-room hotel for $20 million in cash. You’ve gotta…
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#TheRootTrip: Success … and Then … Sadness
As I’ve noted over and over, I don’t know what I’ll find when I go to a Green Book location. Thousands of miles, a few dozen sites, and most are either empty or shells of what they used to be. So when I put 1705 4th Avenue North, Birmingham, Ala., into my GPS for the…
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#TheRootTrip: Martin Luther King Jr. Slept Here
The A.G. Gaston Motel is an important landmark in the civil rights movement and was designated by President Barack Obama as the center of the Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument. Located just a block away from the 16th Street Baptist Church, the site where four black girls lost their lives in 1963 when the Ku…