news
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NJ High School Investigating Hanging Black Dummy Found by Girls Basketball Team
Officials at the Arthur L. Johnson High School in Clark, N.J., plan to investigate an incident in which a visiting girls basketball team found a black dummy hanging from its neck in a room they were assigned, the Courier News and Home Tribune reports. According to the report, when girls from the Plainfield High School…
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ACLU of Mass.: Plan to Use Inmates to Build Border Wall 'Modern-Day Slave Labor'
Last week, during his swearing-in ceremony, Bristol County, Mass., Sheriff Thomas Hodgson proposed offering inmates as free labor if President-elect Donald Trump decided to go forth with his plans to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. As it turns out, some civil rights advocates, the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts included, aren’t very…
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President Obama Pens 55-Page Article on Criminal Justice for Harvard Law Review
President Barack Obama returned to his Harvard Law Review roots (he was the first black president of the 100-plus-year-old journal in his last year at the school) as he penned a 55-page-article on our justice system, how his administration has moved the needle and how far we have to go to make substantive change. Entitled…
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Ala.’s Black Belt Hit Hard by Voter-Suppression Measures
Voter suppression is alive and well, and a case in Alabama’s Black Belt proves it. When the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency announced the closure of 31 driver’s license offices in 2015, a journalist in the state showed that the state’s “Black Belt”— the region of Alabama that takes its name first from the color of its…
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Colin Kaepernick Donates Huge Sneaker Collection to Bay Area Orphanages, Shelters
San Francisco backup quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who has stood for the sanctity of black lives by kneeling during the national anthem, is giving away at least a portion of his colossal footwear collection to Bay Area homeless shelters and orphanages, according to a video posted on Instagram by his girlfriend, DJ Nessa. Kaepernick, who is…
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Sam’s Club’s 1st Black CEO, Rosalind Brewer, Steps Down
Rosalind Brewer, the first woman and the first African American to head Sam’s Club, stepped down from her position Friday, reports Fortune. After five years at the helm of Sam’s Club, Brewer will be replaced by John Furner, Sam’s Club’s chief merchant. Although Brewer said she is leaving the $57 billion-a-year company because “she wants…
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Dylann Roof Wears Racist Symbols on Shoes in Court
Dylann Roof, who was convicted in December of killing nine black parishioners in Charleston, S.C.’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in 2015, has been wearing shoes adorned with racist symbols to court as recently as Monday, the Daily Beast reports. Roof, who is representing himself in the murder trial and who testified that he has…
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Throwing Shade at Throwing Shade: How TV Land’s New Show Leeches Off Black Gay Culture
I imagine that Erin Gibson and Bryan Safi are lovely white people, but that doesn’t make the formal rollout of their new TV Land late-night show Throwing Shade any less grating. And before anyone else mentions it for the umpteenth time: Yes, plenty of us are well aware that these two have been using that…
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4 Suspects in Alleged Hate Crime Streamed Live on Facebook Ordered Held Without Bail
The four suspects arrested in the alleged hate crime in Chicago that was streamed live on Facebook were charged in court Friday and ordered held without bail. Jordan Hill, 18; Tesfaye Cooper, 18; and sisters Tanishia, 24, and Brittany Covington, 18, had their first court appearance at the Leighton Criminal Court Building in Cook County.…
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NYPD Captain Says Department Is More Focused on Rape by Strangers, Not Acquaintances
A New York City police captain has blamed the lack of arrests in sexual assault reports on the fact that most of the reported cases were “acquaintance rape.” Sexual attacks in the Greenpoint neighborhood of New York City’s Brooklyn borough went up by 62 percent over the last year, and according to DNAinfo, police statistics…