
Not a single House Republican voted for the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. By John Nichols, The Nation — “Old battles have become new again,” said US Representative Terri Sewell,…
Not a single House Republican voted for the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. By John Nichols, The Nation — “Old battles have become new again,” said US Representative Terri Sewell,…
By Nkechi Taifa — Normally my morning walks don’t include going down Memory Lane, particularly one that has been invisible for almost a century. But there I was, in Lafayette…
By Catarina Saraiva, Bloomberg — The average White household in the U.S. today has amassed about seven times more wealth than the average Black household. The disparity widened in the…
By Stacy M. Brown, NNPA Newswire Senior National Correspondent — NNPA NEWSWIRE — “It is important to recognize the International Decade for People of African Descent as an international corrective…
By David Crary — The U.S.-based branch of the Jesuits has unveiled ambitious plans for a “truth and reconciliation” initiative in partnership with descendants of people once enslaved by the…
By Anne C. Bailey — Some 156 years after the end of the Civil War and the official abolition of slavery through the 13th Amendment, the idea of reparations is gaining…
By Derek H. Alderman, Joshua F.J. Inwood— How can maps fight racism and inequality? The work of the Black Panther Party, a 1960s- and 1970s-era Black political group featured in a new…
The legacy of slavery — and the centuries of theft it entails — does not dwell in the long-forgotten past for Black people. It’s our now. By Michelle Singletary, Washington…
By Rodney A. Brooks — When it came to getting healthcare during the 1918 influenza epidemic, America’s Black communities, hobbled by poverty, Jim Crow segregation and rampant discrimination, were mostly forced to fend for themselves. Opportunities for hospital care proved scarce, leaving many relying on family care and, where available, the small but burgeoning ranks of Black nurses. When the 1918 influenza epidemic began, African Americans were already beset by a barrage of social, medical…
In a political season of dog whistles, we must be attentive to how talk of American freedom has long been connected to the presumed right of whites to dominate everyone else. By Jefferson Cowie, Boston Review — “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” Alabama governor George Wallace’s most famous sentence fired through the frigid air on the coldest day anyone in the state could remember. His 1963 inaugural address—written by a…
Police violence linked to segregated housing. By Charlene Crowell — The August 23 police shooting of an unarmed Black man in Kenosha, WI, triggered yet another round of community protests and national news coverage of a Black man. A series of multiple gunshots fired by a local police officer, were not fatal for 29-year old Jacob Blake; but may have permanently paralyzed him from the waist down. Days later on…
The country needs truth-telling and acceptance of our moral, legal, political, and sociocultural responsibilities. By Joyce Hope Scott, BU Today — This is a transformative moment in history in the United States as well as in the rest of the world. Despite myths of a post-racial society as a result of many positive social transformations, we are today again forced to examine our inheritance of America’s great sin—slavery and its…