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First Lady of the United States It is no revelation that Michelle Obama is more popular than President Obama. While she has the intellect to make policy, as first lady she doesn’t have to. Instead Mrs. Obama concentrates on youth, applying style and insight in the Let’s Move! campaign, promoting new nutritional standards with Choosemyplate.gov…

Ntsiki Biyela is an oddity in South Africa: She is a winemaker. She stands out not for her profession in this winemaking country but for her color. She is one of a handful of black South Africans — and surely the best known — making wine. Her story is especially unusual because she had never tasted wine…

By the late ’20s, Armstrong’s influence as a trumpeter and vocal stylist was central to what jazz was and would become. According to the writer Albert Murray, by the early ’30s, his celebrity and status as a culture hero had men across the United States imitating his dress style, too. Captions by Greg Thomas Ellington,…

This moving scene on the edge of the Boston Common depicts black volunteer soldiers and their white colonel as they set off for battle against the Confederate Army in 1863. The 1989 film Glory, starring Denzel Washington and Morgan Freeman, told the story of the courageous black regiment. Captions by Gary Lee Opened in 1835…

At the 1999 VMAs, Afeni Shakur and Voletta Wallace, the mothers of slain rappers Tupac and the Notorious B.I.G., appeared, along with Will Smith, to present Best Rap Video (Jay-Z won). Though their sons had been embroiled in a long-running feud, Ms. Shakur said goodbye to all that, declaring, “We stand united as mothers preserving…

It’s tall (the centerpiece sculpture is 30 feet), expensive (the final cost is $120 million) and sprawling (the entire thing takes up four acres). The Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial, which will be unveiled on Aug. 28, might be epic in scale, but it’s the latest in a long list of homages — large…

Rice University Instead of focusing on how hip-hop and religion clash, Rapper Bun B of the iconic Southern hip-hop duo UGK co-taught this course to unpack the similarities between the two. “We’re showing instances where hip-hop and religion have the same goals and ideology in common within the context of the culture,” Bun B told…

Many assume that the filmmaker was born in New York, but Shelton Jackson Lee, nicknamed Spike by his mother, was born in pre-civil rights Atlanta to Jacqueline Carroll, an art teacher, and William James Edward Lee III, a jazz musician. When he was 2 years old, his family moved to the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn,…

The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, featuring fascinating details about local, national and international rights movements, should be the first stop for any visitor to the city. Captions by Gary Lee Tourists tour a permanent exhibition at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. A sculpture in Birmingham’s Kelly Ingram Park depicts two schoolchildren jailed for demonstrating against…

Obama told NPR last month, “What I really want right now is to get a debt-ceiling deal for my birthday.” His birthday wish came true — but only at the last possible moment, after months of resistance from certain GOP lawmakers with a “my way or the highway” approach to governing. Rather than employ the…