Featured
‘Half American’ explores how Black WWII servicemen were treated better abroad. By Dave Davies / NPR Podcast
Though more than one million Black Americans contributed to the war effort, historian Matthew Delmont says a military uniform offered no protection from racism.
Historian Matthew F. Delmont is the author of a book about the Black American experience in World War II, which isn’t limited to their contributions to the war effort. Delmont describes the discrimination Black Americans faced in the military and in civilian defense industries, and the brutality many Black American servicemen suffered when stationed near white communities that resented their presence. But Delmont writes that many Black Americans were energized and enlightened by their experiences in the war, and later became active in the Civil Rights Movement. Matthew Delmont spoke with Dave Davies. His book is titled “Half American: The Epic Story Of African Americans Fighting World War II At Home And Abroad.” Read more and listen here
Related: These 6 Books Tell the Stories of Black Military Veterans. By Ahsan Washington / Black Enterprise
Related: Police Violence Against Black WWII Veterans. By Candace Cunningham / AAIHS
Related: Let’s Give Black World War II Vets What We Promised. By Timothy Noah / The New Republic
Political / Social
The Joe Biden Re-election Dilemma. By Charles M. Blow / NYT
Joe Biden should be far and away the favorite to win re-election in 2024.
The American economy continues to gather strength. He has a solid string of policy victories. And his main Republican opponent, Donald Trump, is lost in a jungle of legal troubles. The risk of a Biden loss is real, and no amount of political ego or posturing can disguise that. According to the Times/Siena poll, Biden is losing ground among younger, nonwhite and less engaged voters. Read more
South Carolina natives Nikki Haley and Tim Scott’s complicated history on display as they battle for GOP nomination. ByAbby Cruz, Gabriella Abdul-Hakim, and Nicholas Kerr / ABC News
Haley, who once appointed Scott to the U.S. Senate, leads him in several polls.
Sen. Tim Scott has spent the past few weeks hurling insults at fellow South Carolinian Nikki Haley following a feisty exchange between the two at the second Republican primary debate, exposing a rift between the two South Carolinian candidates with a history that goes back over a decade. Read more
Media must stop overcorrecting for too much Trump exposure: The public needs a closer look at him. By Heather Digby Parton / Salon
It may be hard to believe, but Donald Trump is fading from some people’s memories. It’s time to remind them
The press needs to keep in mind that this relentless recitation of poll numbers showing Trump slightly ahead a year out is setting in stone a narrative that will serve Trump’s purposes very well if he loses. He won’t say the polls were wrong, he’ll say they prove that the election was rigged. The constant media criticism of Biden’s age, the lack of attention paid to his very real accomplishments and lackluster response to Trump’s promises to destroy democracy are priming plenty of people to believe that Biden can’t win and that Trump isn’t really that bad. And that plays right into Trump’s plans to once again call on his people to “fight like hell” if he loses. Read more
A guide to the friends and patrons of Clarence and Ginni Thomas. By Shawn Boburg / Wash Post
These are the associates of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife, Ginni, who have given gifts, made payments or otherwise supported the couple based on recent reporting from various news outlets
The revelations about the Thomases’s interactions with billionaires have fueled calls for the Supreme Court justices to be bound by a code of ethics. Though Thomas has amended some details in his financial disclosures, saying errors and omissions were the result of misunderstandings, he has said he was not required to report many of the personal gifts he received from wealthy friends. A lawyer for Thomas has said “no one influences Justice Clarence Thomas’s jurisprudence.” Read more
Advocates helped rally Black voters in MS. Then came ballot shortages. Deborah Barfield Berry, Sudiksha Kochi and Charlie Drape / USA Today
Cassandra Welchlin and other community activists said they pleaded Tuesday with voters in long lines at polling sites in Jackson, Mississippi to stay and cast their ballots.
They visited churches, fire stations and schools that served as polling sites, offering snacks and water and hoping voters would hang on longer. But some left anyway. They had to go to work, pick up their children or they simply gave up. “It was definitely disappointing, disheartening,’’ said Welchlin, executive director of the Mississippi Black Women’s Roundtable. “But it also made me personally want to work to improve that and to really begin to think about strategies to help make sure this doesn’t happen again.’’ Read more
Voters drub Moms for Liberty ‘parental rights’ candidates at the ballot. By Valerie Strauss / Wash Post
In Pennsylvania, Iowa, Virginia, Minnesota, New Jersey and elsewhere, the education culture war fell flat
In 2021, the right-wing “parents rights” Moms for Liberty claimed victory in 33 school board races in a single county in Pennsylvania — Bucks — saying that it had helped turn 8 of 13 school districts there with a majority of members who support their agenda. Tuesday’s elections were a different story. In Bucks County, and many other districts across the country, voters rejected a majority of candidates aligned with the group’s agenda in what elections experts said could be a backlash to their priorities. Read more
Related: “I’m so tired of these psychos”: Moms for Liberty is now a toxic brand. By Amanda Marcotte / Salon
Related: Youngkin’s disastrous night shows the right’s culture war has fizzled. By Greg Sargent / Wash Post
On How To Love Your Nonexistent Black Son: A Matt Gaetz And Mike Johnson Nonstory. By Stephen A. Crockett Jr. / HuffPost
America recently learned that newly crowned House Speaker Mike Johnson has a Black son — or does he?
This brings us to the adoptive son of color as stage prop, which usually works like this: Be a white politician, most likely male, and wait until a person of color in Congress notes that you don’t know the difficulties of being (insert race) in America, and then watch as the offended white congressman wields his “adopted” child like a sword or a pointer. It’s all very theatrical. Of course, that son will not actually be adopted. And of course there will be difficulty figuring out the son’s real connection to said politician, but that hasn’t stopped everything from already happening. Read more
Ethics / Morality / Religion
The gunfire in Gaza might abate. Alas, not so the horror of global hatred. By Colbert I. King / Wash Post
America — racism notwithstanding — is mine. Israel exists. And Palestinians must have a homeland, too. It doesn’t matter who got there first. They have a right to a safe place of their own, without any semblance of neocolonial governance. Land that they and their children can call all their own.
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said to the crowd that marched with him from Selma to Montgomery in 1965.
“I know you are asking today, ‘How long will it take?’ … How long will justice be crucified, and truth bear it? I come to say to you this afternoon, however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long, because ‘truth crushed to earth will rise again.’ … How long? Not long, because ‘no lie can live forever.’ … How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” I should live so long.
Related: Black Christian leaders call for cease-fire in Gaza. By Jack Jenkins / RNS
US Jews plan historic March for Israel at National Mall Tuesday. By Yonat Shimron / RNS
American Jews and their allies are expected to rally en masse on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., Tuesday (Nov. 14), to show their support for Israel following the deadly Hamas terrorist attacks along its southern border a month ago.
The March for Israel, coordinated by two of the largest Jewish organizations in the U.S. — the Jewish Federations of North America and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations — is expected to be a historic event drawing tens of thousands of Jews from across the country. Members of Congress and senior members of the U.S. administration have been invited to speak, as have families of the 200+ people still being held hostage by Hamas. Read more
Colleges pressured to curb antisemitism; Islamophobia. By Tovia Smith / NPR
It didn’t take long after the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre in Israel for demonstrations on U.S. campuses that began as vigils to devolve into vitriol and violence.At Cornell University, a student was arrested for allegedly threatening to slit Jews’ throats. At Drexel University, a Jewish student’s dorm room door was set on fire. At the Cooper Union in New York, pro-Palestinian demonstrators banged on windows and doors of a library where Jewish students were holed up inside. And at Tulane University, protesters assaulted a Jewish student, breaking his nose. Read more
Christianity Has Anchored Free Societies. What Happens as They Deconvert? By Bonnie Kristian / Christianity Today
Philosopher John Gray predicts we’re headed for an age of all-consuming moral warfare.
Historical / Cultural
The Wilmington massacre of 1898: a shocking episode of racist violence. By Daniel R. Biddle / The Guardian
As modern-day Wilmingtonian Tim Pinnick, a genealogist, put it: “Things functioned the way they were meant to function as a result of Emancipation.”
But if Wilmington looked to some Americans like a model for the south, powerful white leaders, including the president of Wilmington Cotton Mills Company, the editor of the Raleigh News & Observer and the chairman of the state Democratic party, could not abide it. They set out to topple what the newspaper editor labeled “Negro rule”. One hundred and twenty-five years ago, on 10 November 1898, a shocking coup d’état was executed. Read more
Tulsa massacre survivors make final court plea for reparations. By Ashlee Banks / The Grio
“The survivors are getting older and there’s now a sense of urgency to for them to finally get justice,” said Christina Becker, associate director of racial justice at equity at Human Rights Watch
Attorney Randall Adams, partner at Schulte Roth and Zabel LLP and a lead attorney on the case, told theGrio, “If the Oklahoma Supreme Court does not reverse the trial court’s decision … that is it for our lawsuit.” “We cannot appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court because this is not a question of federal law. It is a question of Oklahoma law,” he added. Read more
Dawoud Bey, Full Frame: On Richmond’s Trail of the Enslaved. By Siddhartha Mitter / NYT
In haunting studies of places charged with Black American history, a photographer celebrated for portraits now lets the land do the talking. Dawoud Bey, “Untitled (The Light on the Trail)” from the series “Stony the Road,” 2023,
On what is now designated as the Richmond Slave Trail — where thousands of Africans were taken off ships from the Middle Passage, and later, when Richmond became the supply hub of the 19th-century chattel trade, loaded for shipment to the Deep South — the atmosphere feels properly primeval. “When you enter this way there’s no prelude,” said the photographer Dawoud Bey, when we walked the trail in late September. “You’re just dropped in the space.” Read more
Authors of George Floyd book were told not to talk about systemic racism at Tenn. school event. By Char Adams / NBC News
Journalists Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa, authors of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “His Name Is George Floyd,” are still unclear why they were told they couldn’t read from their book or talk about systemic racism to a room full of high school students in Memphis.
Two days before an event at Whitehaven High School, they said they were “blindsided” by the last-minute restrictions, which they believed event organizers issued in accordance with Tennessee laws restricting certain books in schools. They’d also been told in the weeks before the appearance that their book wouldn’t be distributed at the event. One thing is for certain, the authors said: The students paid the price ultimately. Read more
Black Music Sunday: Swingin’ with the legendary Buck Clayton on his birthday. By Denise Oliver Velez / Daily Kos
I grew up hearing a lot of the Count Basie bands’ music and knew Clayton as one of his most stellar soloists.
Later in life, as a DJ in Washington, D.C., I played him often, so his absence on this top 50 list was perturbing. With that in mind, I decided I’d correct the omission and use his birthday as an opportunity to celebrate Clayton, and introduce his music to readers unfamiliar with his talents. Read more and listen here.
The Jazz Continuum’ explores Black social dance — from past to present. By Celia Wren / Wash Post
Choreographer LaTasha Barnes celebrates the decades-spanning ties between manifestations of Black artistry in music and dance
To connect with the Lindy Hop, a form of swing dance born in Harlem in the 1920s, you can look beyond the Lindy Hop. At least that’s the premise of “The Jazz Continuum,” running at the Kennedy Center on Nov. 17 and 18. According to the vision of this performance-meets-party-meets-historical-eye-opener, there are echoes and affinities that link the historic dance style to more recent modes such as hip-hop and house. Read more
35 Years After Its Debut, Tracy Chapman’s ‘Fast Car’ Wins a Song of the Year Award. By Mike Ives / NYT
She is the first Black songwriter to receive the honor from the Country Music Awards. Her 1988 hit reached a new generation of fans as a cover by Luke Combs.
“It’s truly an honor for my song to be newly recognized after 35 years of its debut,” Chapman’s statement said. “Thank you to the C.M.A.s and a special thanks to Luke and all of the fans of ‘Fast Car.’” Read more
Sports
Las Vegas Raiders’ Black leadership is a picture of progress. By Jason Reid / Andscape
Las Vegas is NFL’s first club to have African Americans at team president, general manager and head coach. From left to right: Las Vegas Raiders interim head coach Antonio Pierce Raiders, team president Sandra Douglass Morgan, and interim general manager Champ Kelly pose for a photo ahead of a game against the New York Giants at Allegiant Stadium on Nov. 5 in Las Vegas
The photo, which is unlike any in NFL history, shows the hiring potential of both the Las Vegas Raiders and the league at large. Read more
Michael Jordan Jumpman biography excerpt: When Air Jordan sneakers were blamed for “Black-on-Black crime.” By Johnny Smith / Slate
In 1990 an explosive cover story fed the era’s fearmongering—and demanded that the megastar account for it.
For a moment, Rick Telander thought, Michael Jordan looked like he might cry. In 1990 the senior writer from Sports Illustrated approached Jordan before practice and told him about the murder of a 15-year-old Black boy named Michael Eugene Thomas. About a year earlier, the ninth grader from Anne Arundel, Maryland, had paid $115.50 for a pair of Air Jordans. Read more
Naomi Osaka Name Drops LeBron James as She Reaps the Rewards From His Business Venture Backing. By Akshay Kapoor / Essentially Sports
The Japanese tennis sensation Naomi Osaka has started a journey through her recently founded venture, Hana Kuma. As this venture has now started to capture the world’s attention with its success, Osaka used the opportunity to reveal the incredible support of NBA and LA Lakers legend LeBron James.
Andre Iguodala to lead NBA players union amid leadership shake-up. By Ben Golliver / Wash Post
Longtime NBA player Andre Iguodala will lead the National Basketball Players Association following the abrupt resignation of executive director Tamika Tremaglio, the players union announced Thursday.
Iguodala, 39, will serve as the union’s acting executive director, though it remains unclear whether this will evolve into a permanent role. He is expected to meet with NBPA staff members at their Manhattan headquarters in the coming days, according to people with knowledge of the situation. Read more
Minnesota Vikings quarterback Josh Dobbs isn’t just brilliant, he’s part of a new era. By Matenzie Johnson / Andscape
As a Black QB, his intelligence being publicly recognized is rare in sports
Anyone who decides to major in aerospace engineering and maintain a 4.0 GPA, as Dobbs did at the University of Tennessee from 2013-16, is smart. Tennessee’s aerospace engineering program focuses on the development of “the foundation for the design, development, production, testing, and applied research associated with aerospace vehicles.” This isn’t a common curriculum for a typical Division I football player. Read more
Related: He’s a college basketball player — and a law student on a mission. By Candace Buckner / Wash Post
Related: Steeled by lessons off the field, C.J. Stroud (Texans QB) is taking the NFL by storm. By Zak Keefer / The Athletic
Victor Wembanyama’s hard launch to NBA stardom. By Ben Golliver / Wash Post
An up-close look as the one-of-a-kind Spurs rookie lived up to the hype in his first two weeks in the league.
In city after city during the first two weeks of Wembanyama’s NBA career, Popovich was queried about the new face of his franchise. Can he handle the pressure? Does he get along with his teammates? Is he excited to play in big markets such as Los Angeles and against his childhood heroes such as Kevin Durant? Will he accept pointed coaching? Are his teammates passing him the ball enough? Can he avoid foul trouble? Who, exactly, is basketball’s next big thing? Read more
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