Feature – ‘The Blood of Lynching Victims Is in This Soil.’ By preserving soil from sites where blacks died from lynchings, a museum aims to help America acknowledge the racist brutality in its past. The soil in these jars represents the lives of countless Americans who never had a proper burial, who met unspeakably violent deaths for “serious offenses,” like arguing with a white man. Read more 

Barack Obama Sits Down With John Lewis to Discuss MLK’s Legacy and the Power of Activism. In a six-minute video released Wednesday, on the 50th anniversary of the civil rights leader’s death, Lewis revealed how he coped with the devastating news of King’s assassination. Read more and listen. 

‘Martin Luther King Jr.’s Unfinished Work on Earth Must Truly Be Our Own.’ Five days after King was assassinated, his “spiritual mentor” Benjamin Mays delivered a eulogy for his former student. Read more 

Winnie Mandela was always influential, often controversial, but vital to freedom’s cause. Of all the personalities I’ve met in a long journalism career built on intruding into other people’s lives at the most inopportune moments, no one left a more indelible mark on me than a singular, purely-by-chance interview with Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, who died Monday. She was 81. Read more 
Stephon Clark: Rhythms of Tragedy. I can’t escape the reality that there is a ritualization of these traumas in which the shootings serve as catalysts, a lancing of the boil, in which decades of oppression, neglect, desperation and hopelessness finds a venting valve. Read more 

Secret use of census info helped send Japanese Americans to internment camps in WWII. In 2000, Anderson and Seltzer found documents that showed officials with the Census Bureau had provided block-level information of where those of Japanese ancestry were living in California, Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Idaho and Arkansas. Read more 

Chicago sees drop in killings and shootings for 13 consecutive months. Chicago police attributed the recent declines to the hiring of more officers, stronger community policing efforts and investments in technology, such as gunshot detection systems and predictive crime software to help deploy officers. Read more 

Searching For A Motherland As A Black Latina. Though 25 percent of U.S. Latinos self-identify as Afro-Latino, we are not always made to feel at home in our own country. To be Latinx in the U.S. is to encounter xenophobic rhetoric from the top of our nation’s political leadership down to its base. Read more 

Integration Now, Integration Forever. Unfortunately, the mid-70s were, by some measures, a kind of a high-water mark. School integration peaked then, and American schools have been resegregating since. Measured by Google Ngram, the phrase “racial integration” was used most frequently then; people have been using the phrase less and less ever since. Read more 

Listening to Miles Davis and John Coltrane’s Final Tour. By bringing Coltrane back into the group for this European tour, one of the band’s most prestigious showcases, Davis in effect relegated himself to the role of a sideman in his own band. Read more 

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