culture

When 73-year-old soul singer Lester Chambers took time out of his performance to dedicate his rendition of Curtis Mayfield’s “People Get Ready” to the life of Trayvon Martin, there was a chance some people would walk out in protest. What he didn’t expect was one audience member to charge the stage instead, but that’s exactly…

(The Root) — I wanted to write something eloquent about George Zimmerman being found not guilty of second-degree murder and manslaughter. It’s all that’s been on my mind since I was scanning Sirius stations Saturday night as I drove back to New York and heard a DJ repeating, “Not guilty? Not guilty? Not guilty?” Each…

In her piece for Salon, Roxane Gay argues that racism hurts everyone. She explores the racism that led to the killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman. A young and unarmed black man was walking home from a convenience store and was murdered by a man with a gun who claimed he was defending himself.…

The Justice Department would have a strong civil rights case against George Zimmerman for killing Trayvon Martin, if it chooses to file charges, Earl Ofari Hutchinson says in a piece for the Huffington Post. The moment George Zimmerman was acquitted, the NAACP and the Reverend Al Sharpton immediately called on U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder…

In light of the assumption that black people would riot after the not-guilty verdict in the George Zimmerman trial, Edward Wyckoff Williams writes in Salon, it’s important to remember that whites have their own history of violent rioting. If there is no justice, there can be no peace. But in the American South it seems…

(The Root) — A black teenage boy in the South, who did nothing wrong, was attacked in the dark of night by a stranger. He was beaten and murdered, in cold blood, but an all-white jury fully acquitted the perpetrator — under the guise that reasonable doubt existed and the prosecution had failed to prove…

(The Root) — This image is part of a weekly series that The Root is presenting in conjunction with the Image of the Black in Western Art Archive at Harvard University’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research.  In a scene scarcely imaginable if not for its all-too-common occurrence in reality, an incident of the 19th-century slave…

In the wake of news outlets airing the photo of Trayvon Martin’s dead body during George Zimmerman’s trial, disturbingly, teenagers are once again taking it upon themselves to re-enact that frightening image. According to the Daily Mail, the social media trend, known as “Trayvoning,” consists of people (mainly white teens) “lying motionless on the ground…