When David A. Thomas, the president of Morehouse College, canceled the school’s football season on Friday, there were a number of factors he did not consider: a lucrative television contract (Morehouse has none), the loss of ticket revenue (B.T. Harvey Stadium has 9,000 seats) or the opinions of any other university presidents. Instead, Thomas homed […]
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This weekend we celebrate the creation of the United States, though that project remains substantially incomplete. This year of crises has underscored the distance between the lofty rhetoric of our founding documents and the persistent inequalities of American life. This nation began as a set of promises that it has yet to keep. Millions of […]
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When 17-year-old Darnella Frazier filmed the police killing of George Floyd on her phone in May, her video reignited the Black Lives Matter movement and nationwide protests, even prompting one supporter to name her “the Rosa Parks of her generation.” In addition to setting off policy debates about police reform, the protests have also renewed […]
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What’s the fastest way to put music industry money into the hands of its Black creators? A small Swedish synthesizer manufacturer has a plan. Teenage Engineering, which makes sleekly designed, retro-sounding machines adored by dance-music producers, will soon begin sharing sales revenue with a set of Black musicians and other artists of color in the […]
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Late last week, when the embattled Gap brand announced, with great fanfare, that it was embarking on a 10-year partnership with Kanye West to create a new brand, Yeezy Gap, in an all-in bid for relevance and revitalization, a corner of the panting internet noticed one thing was amiss. “What about Telfar?” people asked. They […]
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The president of the College Democrats of America resigned on Wednesday, and members of the executive board pledged not to run for re-election, after the board’s only Black member said he had experienced racism and classism from the organization’s leadership. The Black board member, Matthew Nowling, who had been the organization’s communications director, will serve […]
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In late May, as protests against police brutality began to seize American cities, videos of a Black man on horseback wearing a bulletproof vest spread widely on social media. In many of the posts, users suggested that he had stolen a policeman’s horse. But Adam Hollingsworth, a 33-year-old Chicagoan, is no thief. The horse in […]
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The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s name has been on a lot of politicians’ and pundits’ lips this June, the most tumultuous month yet in what may be the nation’s most tumultuous year since 1968: the year Dr. King was assassinated. The month brought the sort of mass uprising over racial injustice rarely seen […]
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TOKYO — As protests were spreading around the globe in response to George Floyd’s killing by the police, Sierra Todd, an African-American undergraduate in Japan, organized a march last month in Tokyo to show solidarity with American demonstrators. She said she hoped it would prompt Japanese marchers to think about racism in their own country, […]
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Ashley Daily Stegall hated how the plywood looked covering the smashed windows at her parents’ jewelry store in Peoria, Ill. So she asked a local artist to paint flowers on the boards. “The goal is to make people happy,” said Ms. Stegall. For Janet Davis, the reality of what happened in Peoria cannot be easily […]
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The public response to the demonstrations over the killing of George Floyd is now beginning to take shape more clearly along familiar ideological lines — in ways that are likely to propel politics this year and beyond, dividing left and right as Democrats and Republicans take opposing stands on the efficacy and even the legitimacy […]
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Video by Sanya Dosani and Chai Dingari Video transcript Back transcript I’m a Black American. I Need a Gun to Feel Safe in This Country. Some Black Americans never considered buying a gun. Until now. I grew up really anti-gun. I grew up in a pretty liberal California family. I wasn’t into firearms. I was […]
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We saw a man face down on the pavement, pinned beneath a car, and above him another man, a man in uniform, his skin lighter than the man on the ground, and the lighter man was bearing down on the darker man, his knee boring into the neck of the darker man, the lighter man’s […]
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The tumult of recent weeks has made my thoughts turn to Rod Carew, whose past life as a Minnesota Twin speaks to present days in Minneapolis, and the country. In a tweet the other day, the New York Times sportswriter John Branch (my former colleague, since I’ve been retired from the paper for 13 years) […]
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Op-Docs From unjustified stops of Black teenagers to a device to torment people in custody, racist police brutality runs deep. Video transcript Back 0:00/12:51 transcript The Torture Letters From unjustified stops of Black teenagers to a device to torment people in custody, racist police brutality runs deep. An open letter to the boy and girl […]
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The empty storefronts and abandoned buildings that once lined the streets of the Greenwood district in Tulsa, Okla., are becoming canvases for a suppressed history of black excellence. Decades of segregation and disenfranchisement have plagued the neighborhood on the city’s north side, where Black Wall Street — one of the country’s most prosperous African-American communities […]
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A young Black man was tortured and killed on a remote island in Denmark by two white men with known far-right affiliations, one of them with a swastika tattoo on his leg, but the authorities are refusing to call it a hate crime. Noting that the victim, Phillip Mbuji Johansen, and his attackers knew one […]
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The last time the country was at war with itself, Michael Moore made a movie people were mad at, too. It opened at the end of June, 16 years ago. The parent-company that released it didn’t even want to. But after weeks of controversy, the Palme d’Or at Cannes and a very good trailer, Moore’s […]
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Kourtney McGowan was furloughed in March, when the preschool she worked at closed during the coronavirus shutdown. The relationship with her longtime partner quickly crumbled under the pressure. They broke up “due to mental health issues” that she said started to appear with both of them being stressed out and inside all day. McGowan said […]
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I am a white college student trying to be a better racial-justice advocate in the wake of George Floyd’s death. While I have not been very politically active in the past (which I regret), recently I have attended a protest, donated a lot of my savings to bail funds and related nonprofits, called my representatives […]
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For years, people have been calling for John T. Edge to step down as head of the influential Southern Foodways Alliance. They say he is a kingmaker. They say he is a white man — however charming — who has too much power over who tells the story of food in a region where so […]
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“Once you make it on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera, you are set,” the mezzo-soprano J’Nai Bridges said recently. When Ms. Bridges, 33, debuted at the Met in November in Philip Glass’s “Akhnaten,” she had already sung canonical roles around the world. But she found in Mr. Glass’s Nefertiti an ideal vocal and theatrical […]
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“These artworks are stained with the blood of Biafra’s children,” wrote Chika Okeke-Agulu, an art history professor at Princeton, in an impassioned Instagram post three weeks ago calling for a halt to the sale of two wooden statues made by the Igbo people of Nigeria. Mr. Okeke-Agulu believes the items were looted in the late […]
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SAN FRANCISCO — Reddit, one of the largest social networking and message board websites, on Monday banned its biggest community devoted to President Trump as part of an overhaul of its hate speech policies. The community or “subreddit,” called “The_Donald,” is home to more than 790,000 users who post memes, viral videos and supportive messages […]
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Tens of thousands of New Yorkers have poured onto city streets for the last month. They have marched hundreds of miles, closed bridges, shut down highways and, most recently, taken up residence outside City Hall, calling for the police budget to be slashed. In the chaotic first days of the city’s protests demanding police reform, […]
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It wasn’t your usual awards show red carpet. There wasn’t, after all, a red carpet. Instead there were nominees and performers and presenters beamed in from their living rooms or movie-magicked sets. But at the 20th annual BET Awards on Sunday night — for the first time since Covid-19 was declared a global pandemic, and […]
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Political performances by Public Enemy, DaBaby, Alicia Keys and John Legend, civic-minded speeches by Michelle Obama and Beyoncé, and persistent tributes to George Floyd and Breonna Taylor led a virtual, mostly socially distanced and social justice-themed version of the BET Awards on Sunday, the first major awards show of the pandemic era. The host, Amanda […]
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Listen and subscribe to our podcast from your mobile device:Via Apple Podcasts | Via Spotify | Via Stitcher In the weeks since George Floyd was killed by the Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, Americans have been confronting hard questions about bias and racism within law enforcement — and what the role of the police should […]
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Almost anyone who works in the Washington Post newsroom can look inside its publishing system, Methode, to see what stories are coming. And at the height of the furor over Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court in 2018, some who did saw a shocking article awaiting publication. In the article, Bob Woodward, the Post […]
Read More Almost anyone who works in the Washington Post newsroom can look inside its publishing system, Methode, to see what stories are coming. And at the height of the furor over Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court in 2018, some who did saw a shocking article awaiting publication. In the article, Bob Woodward, the Post […]
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JACKSON, Miss. — Mississippi lawmakers voted on Sunday to bring down, once and for all, the state flag dominated by the Confederate battle emblem that has flown for 126 years, adding a punctuation point to years of efforts to take down Confederate symbols across the South. The flag, the only state banner left in the […]
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