Poet and novelist Ben Okri and the writer Tayari Jones discuss the legacy of Maya Angelou’s life and work.

After stalling for years, Google finally released data on the diversity of its workforce Wednesday, admitting that the company is “miles from where want to be.”
Over the last four decades, the United States has undertaken a national project of over criminalization that has put more than two million people behind bars at any given time, and brought the U.S. incarceration rate far beyond that of any other nation in the world.
Fifty years ago, the civil rights movement in the United States made huge strides among continued setbacks. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law, banning discrimination based…

Dr. Maya Angelou, the renowned poet and author, has passed away at the age of 86. Over the years, Democracy Now! featured Angelou’s tributes to Fannie Lou Hamer, Ossie Davis,…
Ta-Nehisi Coates’ brilliant essay, “The Case for Reparations,” recounts centuries of ongoing and persistent racism in America. The sprawling article incorporates slavery, Jim Crow laws, sharecropper abuse, lynching, and many other forms of oppression. But Coates in large part illustrates formal racism by looking at housing policy, specifically in the Chicago neighborhood of Lawndale in the 1960s.