Featured
Jackie Robinson Made the Hall of Fame 60 Years Ago. His First Year in the Big Leagues Was Hell. By Ian Gordon / Mother Jones
Robinson’s impressive play on the field speaks for itself: He was the National League’s most valuable player in 1949, and he helped lead the Dodgers to the World Series title in 1955. But he did that in the face of at-times viciously racist taunts from opposing players and fans who deeply wanted baseball’s first Black player in the modern era to fail, and to fail publicly. Read more
Political / Social
Beto O’Rourke raises Democrats’ hopes again in Texas. By Henry J. Gomez / NBC News
O’Rourke, who lost his last two campaigns, is having another moment, this time with a bid to unseat Gov. Greg Abbott. But is it another tease?
Once again, a buzz is growing around Beto O’Rourke. The one-time presidential candidate, aiming to become Texas’ first Democratic governor in more than three decades, has cut Republican incumbent Greg Abbott’s polling lead in half. He is coming off a historic fundraising period. By his campaign’s count, O’Rourke has already signed up 79,000 volunteers to make phone calls and knock on doors before Election Day. Read more
The most dangerous threat to America? White male entitlement. By Paul Waldman / Wash Post
In other words, the people who have throughout the United States’ history been most advantaged by the Constitution, especially its antidemocratic features, are the most obsessed with the idea that sometime soon they may have to start killing people. They are the ones who enjoyed the full panoply of rights and privileges from the start. They didn’t labor in chains. They didn’t have to fight to be able to vote, or to own property, or to see themselves represented in the halls of power. Read more
Related: There’s a Reason We Can’t Have Nice Things. By Bryce Covert / NYT
‘Where Was The Training?’ Outrage Over Police Beating Of Young Black Man In Tennessee. By Phillip Jackson/ HuffPost
The attorney for Brandon Calloway is questioning why Oakland police acted violently against a 25-year-old over a traffic stop.
Brandon Calloway graduated from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga last year with an electrical engineering degree. He made his mother and father, Dinishia and Edward Calloway, proud. “He has always been very ambitious, very creative and has worked hard. He just wants to take on the world,” his father told HuffPost on Thursday. On July 16, while driving to his father’s home, police in Oakland, Tennessee, beat Calloway after stopping him for a minor traffic violation and pursuit. Calloway was severely injured, requiring stitches in two areas, his attorney Andre Wharton told HuffPost. Read more
Wes Moore wins: Author to be Democratic nominee for Maryland governor. By Brian Witte / USA Today
Bestselling author Wes Moore won the Democratic primary for Maryland governor on Friday, setting up a general election contest against Republican Dan Cox, a hard-line conservative endorsed by former President Donald Trump. Moore, the author of the book “The Other Wes Moore” and the former CEO of an anti-poverty nonprofit, defeated a long list of other high-profile Democrats, including Tom Perez, the former U.S. labor secretary and ex-Democratic National Committee chair, and Peter Franchot, the state’s longtime comptroller. Read more
Aftershock Documentary Explores Maternal Morbidity Crisis Facing Black Women. Tonya Lewis Lee and Paula Eiselt / Daily Beast Podcast
Aftershock directors Tonya Lewis Lee and Paula Eiselt talk to Molly Jong-Fast about why Black women are more likely to die than their white counterparts after giving birth.
Hulu’s new documentary Aftershock looks at the shockingly high disparity in post-natal morbidity rates that Black woman face, compared to their white counterparts. Directors Tonya Lewis Lee and Paula Eiselt look at the preventable deaths of 30-year-old Shamony Gibson, who died in 2019 after the birth of her son, and Amber Rose Isaac, who was just 26 when she died in 2020 after an emergency cesarean section to deliver her son, Elias. Read more and Listen here
Court approves $11 million sale of the Black News Channel media group. By Christopher Cann / Tallahassee Democrat
It’s unclear what the purchaser will do with Tallahassee headquarters and its millions of dollars in equipment.
The Black News Channel has been purchased by Byron Allen , Allen Media Group, a cluster of media companies that includes the Weather Channel and HBCU GO . The sale comes more than three months after the channel suddenly shutdown and laid off 233 workers with less than a 24-hour notice. The sale of substantially all of BNC’s assets for $11 million was approved by Northern District of Florida, Tallahassee Division of the United States Bankruptcy Court, on Wednesday. Read more
Ethics / Morality / Religion
What the history of ‘Judeo-Christian’ can teach us about fighting Christian nationalism. By Eboo Patel and Robert P. Jones / RNS
The hearings conducted by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol have highlighted the powerful role that white Christian nationalism played in the attack. “This is nothing less than an epic struggle for the future of our country. Between dark and light,” said Trump ally Roger Stone, firing up a crowd of pro-Trump protesters the day before the insurrection, according to the committee. “Between the godly and the godless, between good and evil, and we will win this fight or America will step off into years of darkness.” Read more
Let’s Talk About Race like Believers, Not Babel-ers. By Timothy Muehlhoff / Christianity Today
In Christ, we can handle even the toughest conversations without speaking past one another.
It doesn’t have to be this way, says Isaac Adams, especially among those calling themselves brothers and sisters in Christ. In Talking About Race: Gospel Hope for Hard Conversations, Adams, a pastor at Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, DC, offers biblical and pastoral guidance on speaking (and hearing) racial truth in love. Timothy Muehlhoff, a communication professor at Biola University and codirector of Biola’s Winsome Conviction Project, spoke with Adams about the keys to Christ-exalting conversations on race. Read more
Kendrick Lamar’s new album reminds us that even prophets are fallible. By Andre Henry/RNS
Lamar has been counting the days: “I been going through something. One thousand eight hundred and fifty-five days,” he warns at the start of his latest offering, “Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers” — sound advice for any prophetic encounter. “Be afraid.”
Lamar repeatedly shows on the album that he understands the essential task of prophetic work: to tell the uncomfortable truth. “Tell them, tell ’em, tell them the truth,” a flurry of voices goad him on “United in Grief.” “This is my undisputed truth,” he proclaims on “Purple Hearts.” But the uncomfortable truth isn’t delivered on the new album through the moralistic grandstanding we might expect from someone assuming the mantle of prophet. Instead, Lamar’s truth-telling comes via vulnerable — albeit sometimes problematic — storytelling. Read more
Historical / Cultural
Why Slavery is So Hard to Teach in Schools. By Giulia Heyward / Capital B
One group of Texas educators recently suggested that slavery be introduced to second graders as “involuntary relocation.”
The board rejected the proposal, but the incident is only the latest controversy surrounding how slavery is taught in American schools. Classes have held mock slave auctions where Black students have been “sold” by their white classmates. In New York, a white teacher told his mostly Black students to pick cotton during a lesson about slavery. And in Texas, a teacher told her eighth-grade students to list pros and cons of slavery on a worksheet titled, “The Lives of Slaves: A Balanced View.” School systems across the country are grappling with how to teach slavery effectively – and often floundering. Without a robust education about slavery and its legacy in the country, systemic racism will continue to flourish and deepen racial divisions. Read more
Racism, policing, politics and violence: How America in 2022 was shaped by 1964. By Robert S. Mcelvaine / Salon
America’s first year of urban “riots” (or “uprisings”) changed our politics forever — and not in a good way
Republican attempts to gain political support by promoting racist fear and hatred, reflexively siding with police in confrontations with African Americans and denouncing Black Lives Matter demonstrations are a prominent feature of our political landscape. But they’re also nothing new. In many ways, the battle lines of 2022 can be seen forming in 1964. A letter published 58 years ago this week in the New York Times can help explain the underlying issues, both then and now. Read more
Alethia Tanner Day honors enslaved woman who bought her freedom. By Omari Daniels / Wash Post
Tanner sold vegetables at President’s Park and saved enough money to purchase the freedom of her family members
Duke Ellington Deserves the 1965 Pulitzer Prize. By John McWhorter / NYT
Want racial reckoning? Then it’s time to give Duke Ellington the Pulitzer Prize he was unjustifiably denied in 1965. The jazz scholar Ted Gioia has circulated a Change.org petition with this call, and as of this writing, it has surpassed 6,000 signatures. I’m hoping it stimulates a big, beautiful noise that undoes this wrong. As Howard Klein reported for The Times in 1965, “the advisory board for the Pulitzer Prizes rejected a unanimous recommendation from the music jury to award Duke Ellington, the jazz musician, composer and bandleader, a special citation for long-term achievement.” Read more
Henry Louis Gates Jr. announced as editor-in-chief of the new Oxford Dictionary of African American English. By
The dictionary will acknowledge contributions of notable Black scholars and the evolution of the English language.
Popular words used in Black culture for centuries are making their way into Oxford’s newest dictionary. Henry Louis Gates Jr., historian and director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University, has announced he will serve as editor-in-chief of the Oxford Dictionary of African American English, a new glossary of language that will contain popular phrases used by historical Black figures and modern-day Black Americans. Read more
Give “Nope” director Jordan Peele credit for his impact on Black horror. By
Jordan Peele’s 2017 surprise hit “Get Out” inaugurated a new era of Black horror. His latest film, “Nope,” highlights both his impact as a filmmaker and a welcome cultural trend. Black people have always been part of horror. They just have mostly not been the ones making money off of it. Peele himself, though, has transformed those dynamics in Hollywood. Read more
‘Black Panther 2’: Watch the Spectacular, Moving First Trailer. By Ethan Millman / Rolling Stone
In the biggest highlight of Marvel’s absolutely loaded Comic-Con panel, the film studio and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever director Ryan Coogler revealed the trailer for the upcoming film, showcasing the follow-up to their 2018 masterpiece. The trailer, soundtracked by a mashup of Tems’ rendition of Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry” and Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright,” shows a nation and family in mourning in the first Black Panther film since Chadwick Boseman, who played the titular character T’Challa, died in 2020. Watch here
How a 23-Year-Old Phenom Named Kingfish Became the Future of the Blues. By Carlo Rotella / Wash Post
Christone ‘Kingfish’ Ingram is a generational talent — and the ideal bridge between different factions of the blues world
Christone “Kingfish” Ingram was wailing on guitar. Eyes shut and head thrown back in the emblematic pose of the guitar hero in ecstasy, he wrung screaming bent high notes and dense, fluid runs from his purple-and-black prototype Kingfish-model Fender. Just seconds into “She Calls Me Kingfish,” the opening song of his set at the Berklee Performance Center in Boston in March, fans were already well on their way up the stairway to guitar-solo heaven, nodding and smiling and shaking their heads in that mmh-mmh-mmm way that guitar freaks fall into when potent stuff starts flowing into their systems through their ears. Read more
The 1990s Denzel Mystery That Should’ve Launched a Franchise. By Dan Kois / Slate
An interview with writer–director Carl Franklin as Devil in a Blue Dress joins the Criterion Collection.
When Devil in a Blue Dress hit theaters in 1995, it should’ve been huge: a stylish thriller based on the first book in the bestselling Easy Rawlins mystery series, starring Denzel Washington at his most marketable, just after his early-’90s trifecta of Malcolm X, Philadelphia, and The Pelican Brief. But the movie disappointed at the box office, despite great reviews and a live-wire supporting performance by Don Cheadle as Easy’s homicidal friend Mouse. (Cheadle won awards from the LA Film Critics and the National Society of Film Critics for his breakout role.) Read more
Sports
Buck O’Neil’s induction into National Baseball Hall of Fame comes 16 years after snub. By Justice B. Hill / Andscape
In his ‘finest hour,’ first Black coach in the major leagues paid tribute to Negro Leagues despite Hall’s rejection in 2006
O’Neil, a nonagenarian who helped found the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, would have spoken for himself on July 30, 2006, when 17 other ballplayers from “Black baseball” were inducted into Cooperstown. Most people around the game had called O’Neil a shoo-in to be selected. But when O’Neil wasn’t … “That was painful, man,” Kendrick said. After all, O’Neil, who died on Oct. 6, 2006, was one of baseball’s finest goodwill ambassadors: He was the brightest star of the 1994 Ken Burns documentary Baseball and he was one of the few ballplayers still alive from the halcyon days of the Negro Leagues. Read more
Charles Barkley’s flirtation with LIV Golf is one big troll. By Dan Wolken / USA Today
Maybe near-universal adoration these days is too comfortable for Charles Barkley, whose defiance of expectations and distaste of decorum have been central to his entire existence.
Why would Barkley give up all of that for LIV, a possibility that is serious enough for him to discuss it over dinner recently with Greg Norman? Maybe it’s money, though it’s hard to imagine anything the Saudis offer will change his life financially at this point. It’s certainly not the platform, which isn’t and never will be as significant as what he has on “Inside the NBA.” And it’s not because it will do much for his public image. If anything, Barkley — whose Q-rating is probably closer to 100 percent than any other person in sports broadcasting — would become as divisive as Phil Mickelson, Dustin Johnson and the scores of others who have gone to work for Saudi Arabia’s sportswashing operations. Read more
Noah Lyles is ready for the moment. By Rick Maese , Adam Kilgore and Joe Moore / Wash Post
The fastest man across 200 meters this year wants more in Tokyo
The best athletes on the planet will gather in Tokyo this summer, hoping to etch their names in the Olympic record books. For track star Noah Lyles, it’s a convergence of passions. The 2019 world champion is a favorite for the medals podium, having posted the year’s fastest 200-meter time at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials. Read more
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