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In her important book Congo Square: African Roots in New Orleans, historian Freddi Williams Evans has documented the history of Congo Square, a site in New Orleans where records from the early 1700s document that freed and enslaved Africans gathered to share and perpetuate traditional African cultural practices. Today that square still exists, just outside…

“[S]adly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA’s first African-American President,” read a pledge in support of “traditional marriage” that GOP presidential candidates Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum…

Category: Noteworthy  Chris Hedges’ May 16, 2011, interview with Princeton professor Cornel West on truthdig.com lit a powder keg among black academics with this now infamous quote by West: “I think my dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men. It’s understandable. As a young brother who grows up in a…

Anita Baker: “Innocent until PROVEN guilty … No cause of death. If you don’t know HOW it happened, you can’t say [whodunit].” Boris Kodjoe: Speechless! All I can think of is the baby. So angry! WTF. Brian White: “Wait … Was the verdict really NOT guilty???” Don Lemon: “Just from the little bit I saw…

From Chicago, Lawrence was selected by the Air Force for astronaut training in 1967. He died a short time later in the crash of an F-104 fighter jet while instructing a student pilot at the controls. Lawrence, who held a Ph.D. in chemistry from Ohio State University, never got to fulfill his dream, but he…

Sheryl Huggins Salomon is senior editor-at-large of The Root and a Brooklyn, N.Y.-based editorial consultant. Follow her on Twitter. Mary J. Blige closed out the 2011 Essence Music Festival at the Louisiana Superdome on July 3, 2011, in New Orleans. Captions by The Root’s editorial staff Trey Songz delighted the crowd at the Louisiana Superdome on July…

Race is undeniably felt on a social level, but biologically the concept doesn’t hold up. This discrepancy is illustrated in a new exhibit at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, “RACE: Are We So Different?” A traveling project of the American Anthropological Association in collaboration with the Science Museum of Minnesota, the exhibit explores…

My dad would put me in front of the TV and give me grits and tell me I was going to get in touch with my black side while I was at his house on the weekends. —Jenée Desmond-Harris, contributing editor My sisters and I would watch and argue over which dancer we got to…

Aguilera’s voice is golden, but her memory may need a little help. During the 2011 Super Bowl, the pop songstress skipped a whole verse of the anthem and exchanged it for some ad-libbed mumbles. Luckily, X-Tina reeled it in by belting out “and the rockets’ red glare” and rousing the crowd. While Aguilera got away…

Lauren is a former Deputy Editor of The Root. Fifty-year-old, openly gay producer-director Daniels is the creative force behind the films Monster’s Ball, The Woodsman, Shadowboxer and Precious, the Academy Award-winning film based on the novel Push by Sapphire. Captions excerpted from the book Black, Gifted and Gay by Leyla Farah. The former mayor of…