If this were a slasher film, one of the teenage protagonists, most likely a young girl running from a masked assailant who knew what she did last summer, would slip in the buffed and shiny halls of Main Street High, the camera zooming in on her screaming face as we brace for the inevitability of what will happen toā¦
āWhat do you think I want, respect or compliance?ā
Washington, DCā āI have some hard truths to say,ā Louis Farrakhan, the 82-year-old leader of the Nation of Islam, boomed. It was a cool October afternoon and he stood on the steps of the Capitol Building; an ocean of black and brown faces moved before him.
Before I met Sierra Mannie, I met one of her sentences: āWhat I do know is that I donāt care how well you can quote Madea, who told you that your booty was getting bigger than hers, how cute you think it is to call yourself a strong black woman, who taught you to twerk, how funny you think it is to call yourself Quitaā¦
Memphis. July 17. A Friday. Carefree black boys call it a night. Darrius Stewart is just around the corner from his mamaās house when blue light hits the rearview mirror of the Chevy Malibu. A routine traffic stop. A simple thing. One week ago, Sandra Bland was stopped in Texas for a simple thing.
He stared at me like he knew me. Like, if we lived in the same hood, we would kick it. We probably would. Hennessy is my favorite drink, too.
āThere are a few things that people donāt know about my brother Samuel Harrell. He wasnāt just an inmate,ā Cerissa Harrell tells a group of nearly 50 prepared to blockade the Dutchess County District Attorneyās office on Poughkeepsieās very public Main Street. Cerissa stands with Diane Harrell, Samuelās widow. Handsā¦
The following correspondence between Brian Alsup and Kiese Laymon took place during the week of August 31, 2015. As John Callahan once wrote of the decades-long exchange between Albert Murray and Ralph Ellison in Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters, it is āthe bounty of a rare and spontaneous friendship in whichā¦
Without dwelling on the progressive policies of decades past, and how they sometimes failed the communities they were designed to safeguard, Iād like to discuss an editorial written by my colleague, Hamilton Nolan (āDonāt Piss on Your Best Friendā), which argues against the recent protest of Bernie Sanders byā¦
Itās late July. There is a helicopter circling. A āghetto birdā on this clear, dark blue night. Iām in my bed, staring at the ceiling fan, trying to sleep. Itās 1:30 a.m. Itās 2:00 a.m. Iām struggling. Iām tired. Itās hot. Someoneās dog is barking. I am now on Facebook, seeing post after post about rumors, or fact, ofā¦
Ta-Nehisi Coates is running late. As a national correspondent for The Atlantic and author of the new book, Between the World and Me, everyone, it seems, wants a word with the 39-year-old Baltimore native these days. His bookāwhich Toni Morrison christened ārequired readingā and which the New York Times hailed aā¦
Living black in a world formed from the crucible of anti-black slavery imposes many moments of visceral absurdity, leaving you in a vast fissure between hysterical laughter, unstoppable streams of tears, and rage hot enough to burn a body. But what body should burn? The end of April imposed a moment on me that madeā¦
Aaron Rushing was a freshman then. He had dark skin and cottony dreads that mostly covered his eyes, and sometimes his mouthāalthough not enough to conceal his gentle and knowing smile. His eyes were puppy-doggish, steady. Later I would learn he was a virtuoso on the guitar and a rockstar on stage, but that afternoonā¦
Last night 300 students at the University of Virginia rallied to protest the violent arrest of Martese Johnson, a fellow student who was reportedly bloodied by officers Tuesday night for trying to enter a local pub with an alleged fake ID.
"Art has to be a kind of confession," James Baldwin said, fifty-four years ago. "If you can examine and face your life, you can discover the terms with which you are connected to other lives, and they can discover them, too." Baldwin, more than any other American writer, showed us how every sentence contained theā¦
At a September townhall meeting in Harlem, Carl Dix, a longtime Uptown fixture and mouthpiece, stood before the microphone in the auditorium of the Schomburg Center and called for mass rebellion. "It's going to take a revolution," he said, "nothing less, to end this and the horrors of the system once and for all."
