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Commentaries/Opinions

Lorraine Hansberry at an NAACP rally in New York City, 1959.

Lorraine Hansberry’s Radical Imagination

By Commentaries/Opinions

For the playwright and activist, neither liberal reform nor countercultural art were enough. The very foundations of American democracy needed to be transformed. By Elias Rodriques, The Nation — In October of 1964, three months after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, Lorraine Hansberry’s play The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window opened on Broadway. At the time, Hansberry was already famous for A Raisin in the Sun, but the intervening years had…

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The Powell administration building at Central State Hospital in Georgia in the 1930s.

How America Has Racialized Medicine During Epidemics

By Commentaries/Opinions, COVID-19 (Coronavirus)

As data emerges that African Americans are suffering disproportionately from Covid-19, medical practices from past epidemics shed light on a history of racism. By Brentin Mock, CityLab — Just a month ago, there was chatter about how African Americans have a unique racial immunity to the novel coronavirus. Now that data is emerging that African Americans are actually contracting Covid-19 at alarming rates, the new chatter is just the opposite: that African…

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atricia Stephens Due (L) with her siblings Easter Sunday, c.1940s

Easter’s Black Roots

By Commentaries/Opinions

By The History Makers — Easter, also referred to as Resurrection Sunday, is the oldest and arguably the most important of all Christian holidays. Like most holidays, its origins extend beyond Christianity. Easter was “derived from a combination of Jewish lore and pre-Christian and pagan practices. It is named after Eostre, the goddess of fertility and birth, worshiped by first-century pagans at the vernal equinox… Christian missionaries saw that this…

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