culture

On Thursday TMZ spotted George Zimmerman at Kel-Tec, a gun-manufacturing company in Cocoa, Fla.  We’re told he was asking questions about the legality of buying a shotgun — specifically, the Kel-Tec KSG. The gun in question is a tactical shotgun, often used for home defense.  It holds 12 rounds of 12 gauge shells. And this is…

(The Root) — The following singles achieved the highest chart positions in the months surrounding the historic March on Washington in August 1963. These pop jingles, R&B tunes and girl anthems boomed out of transistor radios and filled dance halls. They provided an impromptu soundtrack to a period fraught with much transition, protest and activism.…

Dom Giordano, at the Philadelphia Daily News, asks whether Mayor Michael Nutter, who was critical of Eagles player Riley Cooper’s use of the n-word, will take a similarly hard stand against Jay Z and the hip-hop industry “that profits off slurs and guns.” The hip-hop star is slated to perform in Philadelphia. I ask this because…

Writing at the Washington Post, Stephen A. Crockett Jr. says that Lee Daniels’ ‘The Butler illustrates “the extremes of black masculinity,” with Forest Whitaker’s character working as a White House butler while his son chooses a different path: engaging in the civil rights movement. For eons the pendulum of portrayals of black masculinity has swung…

The horrible slaying of a white Australian baseball player in Oklahoma by three teens, two of whom apparently are black, is more representative of escalating gun violence in America than a deadly case of racism, Jonathan P. Hicks writes at BET, because the self-described “bored” teens were not focused on the victim’s race. The 22-year-old…

On Thursday the U.S. Justice Department announced plans to sue the state of Texas because its voter-ID law violates the Voting Rights Act and the Constitution’s 14th and 15th amendments, the Washington Post reports. Attorney General Eric Holder, commenting on the lawsuit, described how the move is part of an ongoing effort to penalize any behavior seeking to take…

(The Root) — The approaching 50th anniversary of the March on Washington is a reminder of another significant anniversary — the 58th anniversary of the death of Emmett Till. I don’t know how many of my peers who grew up in Chicago had parents who told them stories about that time, but for my mother…

Rolling Out is reporting that a forensic report may prove that a white Georgia woman, Sherry West, wrongly implicated two teens in the slaying of her son. De’Marquis Elkins, 17, and Dominique Lang, 15, were arrested and charged in the March death of 13-month-old Antonio Santiago. But their public defender, Jonathan Lockwood, uncovered some shocking evidence, the…

In a scathing 40-page opinion, a federal judge on Wednesday overturned a 1992 conviction of a Philadelphia man, James Dennis, who she said had been unjustly sentenced to die for a murder he probably did not commit, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports. Judge Anita B. Brody said city police and prosecutors ignored, lost, or “covered up”…

In an interview with ABC in Atlanta, Antoinette Tuff, a bookkeeper at Ronald E. McNair Discovery Learning Academy, near Decatur, Ga., recalled the harrowing ordeal on Aug. 20 during which she was held hostage by a 20-year-old man, Michael Brandon Hill. Hill entered the building during school hours with an AK-47. No one was injured.…