culture

(The Root) — In 1988, not long after civil rights lawyer, and Southern Poverty Law Center co-founder, Morris Dees won a case against the Ku Klux Klan that bankrupted one of the hate group’s major arms, Dees took the podium at a national NAACP gathering. He talked about 19-year-old Michael Donald’s 1981 death at the…

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently recounted the harrowing story of losing her childhood friend in the racial attack on the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., when she was just 8 years old, Reuters reports. “As an 8-year-old, you don’t think about terror of this kind,” said Rice, who recounted on Friday…

Brentin Mock writes at Colorlines that this year congressional leaders are likely to restore protections to the Voting Rights Act, which was gutted by the Supreme Court this summer. The speculation comes amid a series of hearings, meetings and verbal commitments from congressional members and civic leaders, he writes. A few weeks ago Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, a…

In a piece at the Huffington Post, Earl Ofari Hutchinson writes that the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing that killed four little girls 50 years ago in Birmingham, Ala., was just another example on a long list of “racist terror attacks that included beatings, shootings, mob attacks, ambushes and, of course, bombings.” It should never…

Clothing represented the only pop of color on the runways during New York City’s Fashion Week, Karen Grisby Bates writes at NPR. She says it’s time to end longstanding racial discrimination on the fashion industry’s runways. That lack of diversity has been a perennial problem in the fashion industry — at home and abroad —…

Fulvio Bressan, a sixth-generation Italian winemaker, faces a boycott of his business after posting a racist rant on Facebook on Aug. 22 about Cecile Kyenge, Italy’s first black government minister, according to the Huffington Post. Though Kyenge, an outspoken advocate of looser immigration laws, has been a frequent target of racist public incidents in recent months, Bressan’s note was particularly abusive.…

Fox 8 is reporting that New Orleans law enforcement authorities have released a video that captured the shooting of an unarmed black man by police as they entered his home last year during a botched drug raid. Former New Orleans police officer Joshua Colclough was sentenced to four years in prison last month in the…

A Jacksonville, Fla., parent has started a petition on change.org asking that a school district to change the name of a high school named for Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general and the first  “grand wizard” of the Ku Klux Klan, the Washington Post reports. The petition has accumulated about 75,000 signatures so far. And, according to…

(The Root) — Fifty years ago tomorrow, the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., was bombed. Four little girls — Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Denise McNair — died in the blast. Violence broke out on the streets in Birmingham, a city with a long history of resistance to Jim Crow…