culture
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#TheRootTrip: Not Much to See at the Evans Tourist Home … Unless You Surprise a Neighbor
This is the Evans Tourist Home in Fort Worth, Texas, listed in the 1957 Negro Travelers’ Green Book. I wasn’t able to find out much about the person who lived here, and honestly, there’s nothing particularly exceptional about this house. It’s just a regular house, now turned into a duplex, in a historic black district…
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#TheRootTrip: Dallas Cowboys Fans Will Find a Room With the Perfect View at This Motel
Whooo!! I’d never been to 99 percent of the Green Book neighborhoods prior to this trip, but I knew where 1839 Fort Worth Ave. was. It was just off Hampton Road, where all of my Dallas relatives live (and, though I can’t prove it, where I believe all 300,000 black folks in Dallas live ……
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#TheRootTrip: The Green Acres Motel Was the Place to Be
As in most cities during the 1950s, white flight was in full flower in Dallas as discriminatory redlining by banks and Realtors worked to create middle-class suburbs and economically deprived inner cities. According to The City in Texas: A History, builders built more than 30,000 new homes in Dallas, but fewer than 1,000 for blacks. In…
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#TheRootTrip: In Irving, Texas, There’s a Black-Owned Franchise Hotel Hidden in Plain Sight
Until the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, most hotels and motels actively discriminated against blacks. And hotel and motel ownership was a rare instance unless the building was completely built by the African-American hotel owner from the ground up (more on that later). The idea that blacks would own a corporate hotel franchise…
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Spike Lee, LeToya Luckett and More Help Kick Off the 2017 American Black Film Festival
The Root is in Miami! And sure, it’s because the world is a scary place and we need a moment away, but it’s also the 21st annual American Black Film Festival. The festival kicked off with a welcome lunch by one of its hugest sponsors, Cadillac. We gathered in Miami’s sweltering heat to fellowship, but…
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It’s Not the Blacks, Tinashe, It’s You
When your name is “Tinashe,” black folks don’t need Scooby Doo or a member of the Mystery Machine to guess that race. Yet the singer-songwriter-dancer is arguing that the lot of us don’t completely embrace her, a mixed-race woman, even though she considers herself to be a black woman. It was one of the more…
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An African in New York: Jazz Singer Somi’s Petite Afrique
“I don’t take coffee; I take tea, my dear. Some extra rice, please, on the side…” My tea leaves steep as I wait for Somi in Silvana, a café and live-music venue on 116th Street in Harlem, just off Frederick Douglass Boulevard. The singer-songwriter—who has topped both jazz and world music charts whilst being compared…
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‘Lynching in America’ Site Launched by Google to Confront the ‘Legacy of Racial Terror’
Google and the Equal Justice Initiative launched a website Tuesday that explores the history and legacy of racial terror in the United States, specifically during the period between the Civil War and World War II, when more than 4,000 black Americans were lynched in this country. Lynching in America is an interactive website created with…
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Should You Ever Trust a White Lady Sitting Cross-Legged on a Couch? Just Asking for a Friend!
My friend Isha Aran over at Fusion said something recently that resonated with my whole entire spirit: If there’s one thing I’ve learned in life, it’s never trust a white lady sitting cross-legged on a white couch. Aran went on to say: “They’re either trying to sell you crystal essences, or about to tell you…