Featured
Will Smith’s ‘Emancipation’ Exposes the Corruption Wrought by Slavery. By Gordon Berg / History
Slavery is almost impossible to portray through any medium. But Fuqua and Smith have marshalled their considerable talents to produce a film that is hard to watch and impossible to look away from.
The hideously scarred back of a Black man known variously as Gordon, the whipped Peter, or merely the scarred slave is the story behind the movie that director Antoine Fuqua has taken as the subject of “Emancipation,” and he has harnessed the star power of Will Smith to depict the unrelenting cruelty of the South’s “peculiar institution.”
The R rating is visible in nearly every celluloid frame. A brief summary of the real Gordon’s harrowing escape saga, given when he staggered into the encampment of several Massachusetts regiments of the Union’s 19th Corps outside Baton Rouge, La., in March 1863, will put the historical accuracy of William A. Collage’s sparse script to the test. Read more
Political / Social
What we learned in Georgia: Raphael Warnock made history, Herschel Walker sent a warning. By Chauncey Devega / Salon
One candidate was a man of unquestioned character. The other was a dangerous buffoon. It was very close. But why?
On a basic level, the Georgia Senate election was about what “type” of Black person white voters were most comfortable with. Such a choice reveals a great deal about whiteness and white identity in the Age of Trump and beyond. The differences were striking. In a powerful essay at the New York Times, Danté Stewart works through the deeper meaning of Herschel Walker and what he represents about race and power, writing that when Walker entered the Georgia race, “he represented himself less as Black people’s potential representative than as white America’s tool”: Read more
Related: Herschel Walker and the Failure of the GOP’s Diversity Pitch. By Jeet Heer / The Nation
Related: The tragedy of Herschel Walker isn’t over yet. By Peniel E. Joseph / CNN
Related: Asian Americans heavily favored Warnock in Georgia runoff, exit poll shows. By Kimmy Yam / NBC News
Latino voters stuck with Democrats in the Southwest in 2022. By
Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto speaks at a campaign rally in north Las Vegas, on Nov. 1.
There’s plenty of evidence that over time, Republicans have gained ground with Latinos in parts of the country, including Florida. But in the Southwest, an inverse trend has taken hold that could have implications for 2024 and beyond. In Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado, Latinos have stuck with Democrats, and that has helped power the party’s gains across a region where Latino population growth has exploded. Read more
Related: Wage gap between Latinas and white men: It’s worse than you think. By and
How Right-Wing Candidates of Color Delivered the House to Republicans. By ,
It should alarm Democrats that these midterm contenders delivered big wins for the GOP, all without moderating their MAGA identity. Shown is Oregon Representative-elect Lori Chavez-DeRemer was just one of many candidates to pick up a critical House seat for the GOP.
A number of Black, Latina, and Latino candidates, all of them sharply conservative, ran strong races while avoiding the extremist label. Seven of these will be victorious Republican newcomers to the House, four of whom won seats previously held by Democrats. Read more
A Supreme Court Case That Threatens the Mechanisms of Democracy. By Andrew Marantz / The New Yorker
At stake in Moore v. Harper is the question of how elections should be run—and who should resolve the inevitable disputes when they arise.
This term, the Court seems prepared to curtail gay rights, to prevent President Biden from forgiving student debt, and to reverse decades of precedent regarding affirmative action. But the most ominous cases may be those concerning the mechanisms of democracy itself: how elections should be run and who should resolve the inevitable disputes that arise. The basic notion is that, because the Elections Clause of the Constitution gives state legislatures the power to administer federal elections, decisions about those elections—whether districts can be egregiously gerrymandered, whether voters need I.D., whether they can vote early or by mail, and so on—can be made by the legislatures alone, unconstrained by state constitutions and unreviewable by state courts. Read more
Meet the 18-year-old who just became the youngest Black mayor in the country. By Char Adams / NBC News
Jaylen Smith, of Earle, Arkansas, said it “feels awesome” to have a place in the history books.
An 18-year-old college freshman is now the youngest Black mayor in U.S. history after beating out his opponent for the position in a small Arkansas town. Jaylen Smith, a recent graduate of Earle High School, said although he was “confident” he’d win the runoff election Tuesday, he was still shocked when he received news of the victory. He will be the mayor of Earle, a town of just under 2,000 people, according to 2020 census data, near Memphis, Tennessee. Read more
Jan. 6 as white supremacy: New research on the toxic spread of “great replacement” theory. By Anthoby Dimaggio / Salon
My research reveals clear links between white supremacist attitudes and support for the Jan. 6 insurrection
As we move closer to the two-year anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol assault, and as the House select committee investigating that event moves toward completing its work, it is worth reflecting on the gravity of Jan. 6 for the future of American democracy. National discourse on the insurrection is notable for omitting a sustained discussion of white supremacy as a primary motive for many Americans who are sympathetic to the Jan. 6 insurrectionists. Academics are generally reluctant to describe one of the two major U.S. political parties as being motivated by white supremacy, expressed in the Republican effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Read more
J. Alexander Kueng, former Minneapolis police officer who helped restrain George Floyd, sentenced to 3 ½ years in prison. By and
J. Alexander Kueng pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting second-degree manslaughter on the day his state trial was to begin last October, agreeing to the plea in exchange for the state dropping a count of aiding and abetting second-degree unintentional murder in the May 25, 2020, death that triggered international protests against police brutality. Kueng appeared remotely from the US Bureau of Prisons Elkton facility in Lisbon, Ohio, where he’s serving a three-year federal sentence for violating Floyd’s civil rights. He did not address the court. Read more
When children ask about race and sex, we have no choice but to answer. By Danielle Allen / Wash Post
These days, we are involved in a great debate about whether and when we should teach kids about race, gender and sex in our schools.
But here’s the thing: There is no way for teachers to avoid teaching about race and sexuality, even in early grades. This means that the only way you can keep knowledge and questions about these histories, experiences and perspectives out of the school curriculum in early grades is to keep Black people or members of LGBTQ families out of schools. Read more
Child welfare investigations are a constant threat in Phoenix. By and
One in three Black children in Maricopa County, Arizona, faced a child welfare investigation over a five-year period, leaving many families in a state of dread. Some parents are pushing back. Shown is Nydea Richards with three of her children in Phoenix.
From 2015 to 2019, the last full year of federal child welfare statistics available before the pandemic, DCS investigated the family lives of 1 of every 3 Black children in Maricopa County, the state’s most populous county and home to Phoenix, according to an analysis by ProPublica and NBC News of data obtained from the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect. Put another way, more Black children in metro Phoenix will go through a child maltreatment investigation than won’t. Read more
Black Family Closes 7-Figure Deal To Create Mississippi’s Own Modern-Day Black Wall Street. By Simone Cheri / Travelnoire
The Reimonenq family’s mission is to create its own version of the historic Black Wall Street of Tulsa, Oklahoma’s Greenwood District as well as the unsung Black Wall Street of Mound Bayou, Mississippi.
Entrepreneur Tony A. Reimonenq Jr, along with his wife and three sons, recently closed a deal on a 20-unit strip mall in the Oak Grove community of Hattiesburg, Mississippi. The family plans to transform the property into a local version of Tulsa, Oklahoma’s Historic Greenwood District, widely known as the original Black Wall Street. The purchase places the Reimonenq family among Mississippi’s roughly three percent of African Americans to have ever independently brokered a million-dollar deal. Read more
Ethics / Morality / Religion
With Warnock’s win, Democrats eye faith as a pathway to victory in the South. By Jack Jenkins / RNS
Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., who is the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, campaigns at a church by the same name in Eatonton, Ga., on Aug. 18, 2022.
Liberal Democrats are commonly cast as “godless” by their conservative opponents. Warnock not only rebuts that kind of talk, he represents a particular brand of social justice-focused Christianity that favors voting rights and prioritizes the poor. By couching those issues in his faith, he offers a prominent counter to the religious right and appeals to the Democrats’ historic base among Black Protestants. Warnock is someone who “embodies the best vision of progressive faith in America,” said Joshua DuBois, who oversaw faith outreach for Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign and in his administration. Read more
Chicago priest Michael Pfleger cleared of abuse charges, reinstated to St. Sabina. By Bob Smietana / RNS
The Rev. Michael Pfleger addresses supporters and media May 24, 2021, outside his church, the Faith Community of St. Sabina in Chicago’s Auburn-Gresham neighborhood.
Plefger had been accused of abuse once before and was suspended as the charges were investigated, then reinstated. His most recent suspension was based on alleged events from three decades ago. The 73-year-old priest, known for his activism against gun violence and for social justice, appeared at 5:00 p.m. Mass at St. Sabina, a prominent Black Catholic congregation, on Saturday, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. Read more
They tell Black men to talk, act and do right — then get behind Herschel Walker. Sounds about white. By Leonard Pitts Jr. / Miami Herald
Black men, they say, should educate themselves. Speak the King’s English. Be honest. Abstain from violence. And for goodness sake, stop having babies out of wedlock.
Then, white conservatives turn around and offer as a candidate in last week’s Georgia senatorial run-off a Black college dropout whose mother tongue is gibberish, who is estranged from fact if not reality itself, who has a reported history of abusing women, including threatening at least one with a handgun, and who has fathered multiple children by women to whom he was not married. Hypocrisy votes Republican. Again. Read more
Historical / Cultural
Tulsa Race Massacre vs. Elaine massacre: How 2 Southern cities face their past. By Scott Neuman / NPR
A dozen Black men were convicted of murder by all-white juries in connection with the 1919 massacre in Elaine, Ark. Above, defendants S.A. Jones, Ed Hicks, Frank Hicks, Frank Moore, J.C. Knox, Ed Coleman and Paul Hall with their attorney at the state penitentiary in Little Rock in 1925 after the Supreme Court overturned their convictions.
The two Southern cities, however, could hardly be more different in the way they have dealt with their history. The Tulsa commission, after researching the events of May 31-June 1, 1921, offered recommendations that have served as a blueprint for how to move toward acknowledgment, healing and even restitution.
In Elaine, the reckoning has come much more slowly. Most historical accounts of the massacre there, including contemporaneous reporting by the prominent African American journalist Ida B. Wells, relate that Black sharecroppers were meeting at a church in a place called Hoop Spur on the town’s outskirts. The farmers were organizing for a larger portion of the profits from their cotton. Read more
How the Right Turned “Freedom” Into a Dog Whistle. By Eric Herschthal / TNR
A new book traces the long history of cloaking racism in the language of resistance to an overbearing federal government. The historian Jefferson Cowie argues in his outstanding and urgent new book, Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power, that one common understanding of the term freedom has been the “freedom to dominate others,” especially against a tyrannous federal government.
On April 23, 1967, George C. Wallace sat for a television interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, ready toreintroduce himself to America. To most Americans outside of the South, Wallace was known as the openly racist, defiantly pro-segregationist governor of Alabama: the one who, four years earlier, bellowed, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” Every time reporters tried to goad him into making a racist remark, he dodged the punch and immediately hit them in the upper lip: Northern cities, he would say, were even more segregated than Southern ones. His message, he told Americans again and again, was not anti-Black at all: It was about freedom from a tyrannous federal government. Read more
Take a look back at legislation geared towar interracial and same sex marriages. By Ayana Archie / NPR
Jim Obergefell, the named plaintiff in the Obergefell v. Hodges Supreme Court case that legalized same sex marriage nationwide, center, stands on the steps of the Texas Capitol, Monday, June 29, 2015, in Austin, Texas.
The House and Senate have passed the Respect for Marriage Act, granting another layer of federal protections to both same-sex and interracial marriages. It will now go to President Biden, who is expected to sign it. Both types of marriages have already been deemed constitutional on a national scale, but the Respect for Marriage Act was drafted soon after the reversal of Roe v. Wade, amid fears that other constitutional rights would be targeted. Here’s a look at some of the legal precedents surrounding interracial and same-sex marriages. Read more
Oregon lawsuit spotlights destruction of Black neighborhoods. By AP and NBC News
Twenty-six Black people are suing Portland, the city’s economic and urban development agency and Legacy Emanuel Hospital, accusing them of the “racist” destruction of the homes and forced displacement. Shown is Elizabeth Fouther-Branch and Bobby Fouther as children standing in front of their great-aunt’s home and in 2021 standing in the front of the parking lot where the house used to stand in Portland, Ore.
A home that was a fixture of Bobby Fouther’s childhood is now a parking lot, the two-story, shingle-sided house having been demolished in the 1970s along with many other properties in a predominantly Black neighborhood of Portland, Oregon. “Growing up there was just all about love,” Fouther said. The lawsuit, filed Thursday in federal court in Portland, shines a light on how urban improvement projects and construction of the nation’s highways often came at the cost of neighborhoods that aren’t predominantly white. Read more
Black Panthers and LAPD. By M. Keith Claybrook Jr. / AAIHS
Black Panther Party demonstration at State Capitol, Sacramento, California, May 2nd, 1967 (Flickr)
There is much to learn from studying the Black Power Movement in the context of the Black intellectual-activist tradition. It takes intelligence to prepare, organize, and counter-organize when dealing with a force that seemingly has the law on its side as well as greater resources such as personnel and firepower. Consider the events surrounding the Southern California Chapter of the Black Panther Party and the shootout with the Los Angeles Police Department at Panther Headquarters on 41st Street and Central Avenue in the early morning of December 8, 1969. Read more
The pioneering Black feminist Dorothy Pitman Hughes has died at aged 84. By AP and NBC News
Shown are Gloria Steinem and Dorothy Pitman Hughes who attend the Ms. Foundation for Women Gloria Awards at Cipriani 42nd Street in New York, May 1, 2014
Dorothy Pitman Hughes, a pioneering Black feminist, child welfare advocate and lifelong community activist who toured the country speaking with Gloria Steinem in the 1970s and appears with her in one of the most iconic photos of the second-wave feminist movement, has died. She was 84. Read more
Black Music Sunday: Giving Big Mama Thornton her birthday props. By Denise Oliver Velez / Daily Kos
Far too often, the role of Black women as part of the foundational cornerstones in American music—whether in blues, jazz, rhythm and blues, or rock and roll—gets either overlooked or underreported and under-researched. One of those women, whose musical performance and songwriting helped launch the careers of two major white artists—Elvis Presley and Janis Joplin—not only got virtually ignored, but also died broke and alone at the age of 57.
One of seven children of a minister in Alabama, Thornton sang in church choirs along with her mother as a child. She was forced to begin working at age 14 when her mother died, and got her first chance to sing in public at a saloon where she scrubbed floors after the regular singer quit her job one night. After joining Sammy Green’s Hot Harlem Review of Atlanta, Georgia, in 1941, she hit the road on the blues circuit throughout the South. While on tour she was treated to live performances by blues legends such as Bessie Smith, Memphis Minnie, and Big Maceo. Read more and listen here.
Tonight I Saw a Falling Star – The James Brown Mystery. By Thomas Lake / CNN Audio Podcast
A strange phone call reveals a question from the grave – was The Godfather of Soul murdered? Almost 40 years ago, a songwriter found herself in musician James Brown’s inner circle. The relationship would nearly destroy her career. Decades later, she’s trying to solve the mystery of James Brown’s death…and her own life. When she makes a call to CNN reporter Thomas Lake, the two stumble into a world of secrets, intimidation, and suspected foul play. Listen here
Sports
USC’s Caleb Williams Wins Heisman After Leading Trojan Turnaround. By Ralph Russo / HuffPost
Williams received 544 first-place votes and 2,031 points to easily outpoint TCU quarterback Max Duggan (1,420).
Southern California quarterback Caleb Williams, the catalyst for the Trojans’ turnaround season, won the Heisman Trophy on Saturday night to make USC the first school to take home college football’s most prestigious player of the year award eight times. Williams and No. 8 USC fell short of the Pac-12 championship and a spot in the playoff, but it was still a rebirth for a college football blue blood that has had only short spurts of success over the last decade. Read more
Brittney Griner Released By Russia In Prisoner Swap. By Nina Golgowski / HuffPost
The two-time Olympic gold medalist reportedly was freed in exchange for imprisoned Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout.
WNBA star Brittney Griner has been released from custody in Russia and is on her way back to the U.S. after a monthslong imprisonment on drug charges, President Joe Biden said Thursday. “She is safe. She is on a plane. She is on her way home,” Biden tweeted along with a photo of him embracing Griner’s wife, Cherelle Griner, in the White House Oval Office. Read more
Related: Blowback Over Griner’s Release Exposes Depth of America’s Divisions. Jonathan Weisman and
Related: The GOP Is Refusing To Celebrate Brittney Griner’s Release. By Lyle O’Connor / HuffPost
Deion Sanders Leaving Jackson State Is No Surprise in the Coaching World. By Kurt Streeter / NYT
His move to the University of Colorado is understandable in the college football world, but that doesn’t mean it can’t hurt given the pledges he had made to his historically Black institution.
Deion Sanders is doing what virtually every college football coach in America would do if given a chance: He is leaving success at a smaller school with limited options for the promised land of better facilities, better support, a deeper bench of more talented players and a chance to play on a bigger stage. Oh, and that raise from somewhere in the range of $300,000 to a reported $6 million a season at the University of Colorado doesn’t hurt. Good for Sanders. But while I’m happy for him, I feel a sense of mourning. Read more
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