Featured
How the Black female head of a top D.C. school was ‘punished for leading.’ By Shirley Moody-Turner / Wash Post
Educator and civil rights activist Anna Julia Cooper, between February 1901 and December 1903. (C.M. Bell/Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)
But just four years into her tenure, days before the start of a new school year, the White director of Washington high schools convinced the D.C. Board of Education not to reappoint M Street’s acclaimed principal. Cooper’s story, now largely forgotten, was part of a wider movement to control the direction of Black public education in the early 20th century. Then, like now, battles over education — and especially the question of who was permitted to lead elite institutions, training the next generation to excel — were proxies in the larger culture wars. Read more
Related: Alabama Republicans Pass Expansive Legislation Targeting D.E.I. By Emily Cochrane / NYT
Related: Kentucky House votes to defund DEI offices at public universities. By AP and NBC News
Political / Social
Radicalized by the right: Elon Musk puts his conspiratorial thinking on display for the world to see. By Oliver Darcy / CNN
The billionaire, one of the most consequential figures to walk the Earth, spent another weekend swimming in the right-wing fever swamps of X — a bad habit that was apparent when his interview with Don Lemon was released Monday morning.
In the contentious interview, Musk equated moderating dangerous and appalling hate speech to “censorship,” bashed the press for legitimate reporting, assailed DEI programs without supporting evidence, skewered advertisers who fled the X platform last year and yet again gave credence to the racist Great Replacement theory, among other things. Read more
Presidential Historian: Trump Actually Doing ‘Us All A Favor’ With Fascist Rhetoric. By Lee Moran / HuffPost
Michael Beschloss also spelled out in the gravest terms why the 2024 election will be like no other.
“I hate it when people treat this race as if it’s just one more presidential campaign,” Beschloss told MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski of the likely rematch between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, who is now the presumptive GOP nominee. “A major party candidate is saying, ‘You elect me, there’s going to be dictatorship, bloodbath, violence, retribution against my political enemies.’ That equals what we saw in Italy, in Germany and other places,” Beschloss warned. He added, “If Americans do not get that, if they choose that voluntarily, then this country has changed in a way that I do not understand.” Read more
Related: Want to Know What Trump Will Do? Listen to What He Says. By Jamelle Bouie / NYT
Related: The Real Corruption Risk Facing Trump. By Alex Shepard / TNR
Why Fani Willis was allowed to stay on as prosecutor of criminal case against Trump in Georgia – and what happens next. By Ronald S. Sullivan Jr. / The Conversation
Judge McAfee entered a mixed ruling that caught most legal observers by surprise. He found that Trump’s defense team did not put forward sufficient evidence to show that Willis had an actual conflict of interest.
To the contrary, McAfee found that the value of Willis’ alleged benefit was less than $15,000 and did not support charges that Willis, who makes over $200,000 a year and was not experiencing any financial hardships, needed or relied on her relationship with Wade. The judge essentially split the baby. By finding there is no actual conflict of interest, Willis is permitted to stay in the case. But Wade was forced to quit because of the appearance of a conflict. Read more
America’s Largest Minority Is Also Its Most Misunderstood. By Marie Arana / NYT
Narsiso Martinez, “Royal-ty” (2021).Credit…Charlie James Gallery and Amon Carter Museum of American Art
History is being made on the Rio Grande. Hundreds of thousands of migrants braved the journey across it last year, setting records and contributing to an urgent border crisis. As spectacle, it has been transfixing. Yet misconceptions abound. The majority of Latinos in this country were born here and are English speakers. Some of us have families who inhabited this continent long before the Pilgrims set foot on its shores. Read more
Related: Who Are Latino Americans Today? Graciela Mochkofsky / The New Yorker
The Crumbleys Have Been Convicted. Black Parents Will Likely Pay a Price, Too. By Nia T. Evans / Mother Jones
The parents of a Michigan school shooter are facing prison terms for their son’s crime.
But while prosecutors and gun safety advocates like the organization Everytown have celebrated the conviction of Jennifer and James Crumbley, others worry that the case establishes a dangerous new precedent—one with legal ramifications that will likely be felt by people quite unlike the Crumbleys. According to the legal scholars and advocates I spoke with after Jennifer Crumbley’s trial, the people likely to be subjected most often to this type of prosecution won’t be white parents like the Crumbleys, but rather parents whose children are Black or brown, poor, and living in neighborhoods plagued by gun violence: Read more
Rankin County, Mississippi: ‘Goon Squad’ leader and another deputy sentenced for torture of two Black men. Four other ex-officers still face sentencing. By , , and
Two White former Mississippi law enforcement officers who were members of a self-styled “Goon Squad” were sentenced by a federal judge Tuesday to prison after admitting to torturing and abusing two Black men last year – and four other White ex-officers who pleaded guilty in the abuse will be sentenced later this week.
Details from the January 24, 2023, incident in Braxton, just southeast of Jackson, eventually came to light after victims Michael Jenkins and Eddie Parker filed a federal civil rights lawsuit in June. They alleged the officers illegally entered the home of a woman whom Parker was helping to take care of; handcuffed, kicked, waterboarded and used Tasers on Jenkins and Parker; and attempted to sexually assault them over nearly two hours before Elward put a gun in Jenkins’ mouth and shot him. Many of the claims were later borne out by federal prosecutors in August as the six former officers pleaded guilty. Read more
Walter Massey, a Physicist With a Higher Calling. By Katrina Miller / NYT
He broke barriers as the first Black physicist in nearly every role. But his identity made him reach for dreams beyond his career as a scientist. A graduate and president of Morehouse College in Atlanta.
His footprint extends beyond science. Dr. Massey served on boards of companies like Motorola and McDonald’s, and even steered Bank of America through the aftermath of the catastrophic housing market crash in 2008. Had Dr. Massey stayed active as a researcher, “he would have gone on to a really successful career in theoretical physics,” Gordon Baym, a physicist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, said at an awards ceremony in 2020. In a draft of his memoir, Dr. Massey had remarked that he was no Gordon Baym, who he felt had a rare intuition for solving a physics problem. Dr. Baym, in his speech, responded: “Well, in following Walter’s manifold successes, I quickly learned that I wasn’t a Walter Massey.” Read more
World News
Secretary Austin: ‘The US will not let Ukraine fail.’ By Laura Kayli / Politico
Democracies will not let Ukraine down in the face of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war of aggression, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin pledged Tuesday.
“The message today is clear: The U.S. won’t let Ukraine fail. This coalition will not let Ukraine fail and the free world won’t let Ukraine fail,” he said. He was speaking ahead of a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, an initiative gathering more than 50 countries that meets regularly to discuss weapons deliveries to Kyiv. It’s Austin’s first international trip since his hospitalization and the first since Sweden joined NATO earlier this month. Read more
What Schumer and Biden Got Right About Netanyahu. By Thomas L. Friedman / NYT
One of my ironclad rules of journalism is this: When you see an elephant flying, don’t laugh, don’t doubt, don’t sneer — take notes. Something very new and important is happening and we need to understand it. Image by CNN
Last week, I saw an elephant fly: The Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer — an authentic, lifelong supporter of Israel — gave a speech calling on Israelis to hold an election as soon as possible in order to dump Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right cabinet. Read more
Are Immigrants the Secret to America’s Economic Success? By Paul Krugman / NYT
When we accuse a politician of dehumanizing some ethnic group, we’re usually being metaphorical. The other day, however, Donald Trump said it straight out: Some migrants are “not people, in my opinion.”
Well, in my opinion, they are people. I’d still say that even if the migrant crime wave Trump and his allies harp on were real, and not a figment of their imagination (violent crime has in fact been plummeting in many cities). And I’d say it even if there weren’t growing evidence that immigration is helping the U.S. economy — indeed, that it may be a major reason for our surprising economic success. Read more
The Forgotten History of Hitler’s Establishment Enablers. Adam Gopnik / The New Yorker
The Nazi leader didn’t seize power; he was given it. The media lords thought that they could control him; political schemers thought that they could outwit him. The mainstream left had become a gerontocracy. And all of them failed to recognize his immunity to shame. Photograph Wikipedia
So the historian Timothy W. Ryback’s choice to make his new book, “Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power” (Knopf), an aggressively specific chronicle of a single year, 1932, seems a wise, even an inspired one. Ryback details, week by week, day by day, and sometimes hour by hour, how a country with a functional, if flawed, democratic machinery handed absolute power over to someone who could never claim a majority in an actual election and whom the entire conservative political class regarded as a chaotic clown with a violent following. Read more
Ethics / Morality / Religion
Poll: Most Americans say religion’s influence is waning, and half think that’s bad. By Jack Jenkins / RNS
As the U.S. continues to debate the fusion of faith and politics, a sweeping new survey reports that most American adults have a positive view of religion’s role in public life but believe its influence is waning.
The development appears to unsettle at least half of the country, with growing concern among an array of religious Americans that their beliefs are in conflict with mainstream American culture. That’s according to a new survey unveiled on Friday (March 14) by Pew Research, which was conducted in February and seeks to tease out attitudes regarding the influence of religion on American society. Read more
Decoding Project 2025’s Christian Nationalist language. By Andra Watkins / Salon
In George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, characters engage in doublespeak, a way of distorting language to obscure its true meaning. Christian Nationalists have mastered their own doublespeak. Nowhere is this more apparent than when reading Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s manifesto for transforming our government into a Christo-fascist regime. Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation. Image by NCR
By studying Project 2025 and the specific language Christian Nationalist politicians use, we can translate the words they say into what those words really mean to them. A Christian Nationalist’s use of a word or phrase may mean something very different to someone outside their community. It is vital to grasp what Christian Nationalists mean when they say things. because they deploy Evangelicalese to hide extreme positions in plain sight. Read more
Related: ‘Cowboy Catholic’ leads Heritage Foundation plans for 2nd Trump term. By Rone Tempest / NCR
The Exvangelicals Searching for Political Change. By Sarah Jones / The New Republic
Former evangelicals are growing in number. But are they a movement?
If 1976 was the year of the evangelical, 2024 could be something else: the year of the heretic. Though a majority of Americans are Christians, the religiously unaffiliated, or Nones, are on the rise. A study from the Public Religion Research Institute says the Nones accounted for 27 percent of the American population in 2022, up from 16 percent in 2006. Major Christian traditions are declining. Twenty-three percent of Americans identified as white evangelical Christian in 2006, PRRI says, a share that declined to 14 percent in 2022. Ethicist David Gushee estimates that “some twenty-five million American adults who had been raised evangelical had left the faith,” McCammon writes. Read more
Historical / Cultural
The Dichotomy of Enslaved Women’s Work in the Antebellum South. By O.G. McClinton, III / AAIHS
The work of enslaved women on plantations was coerced labor performed as a result of their circumscribed condition as chattel. (NYPL Digital Collections)
During the Antebellum era, the institution of slavery intensified its already oppressive restrictions affecting enslaved women. The era was marked by what scholars Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross describe as “a unique mix of trials and tribulations as well as success through struggle.” Enslaved women’s labor included a long list of arduous responsibilities. As Berry explained, non-gendered equality prevailed in agricultural labor, whereas enslaved women who worked in houses “served as housemaids, nurses, cooks, seamstresses, laundresses, dairymaids, weavers, [and] spinners.” Read more
How Virginia Used Segregation Law to Erase Native Americans. By Ashley R. Craig and Gregory D. Smithers / Time
A 1942 photo of a class in front of the Indian View Church built in 1925, on Upper Mattaponi tribal land. The Virginia Indians are the direct descendants of Chief Powhatan, and went hundreds of years without federal recognition.Douglas Graham—CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
On March 20, 1924, the Commonwealth of Virginia enacted the nation’s cruelest, most draconian, segregation law. Designed to preserve white racial “purity,” the legislation became a model for states across the Jim Crow South and beyond. In the halls of Richmond’s capitol building, lawmakers congratulated themselves on passing the Act to Preserve Racial Integrity, popularly known as the Racial Integrity Act. The Act made it a felony to falsify the racial identity of an individual on birth, death, or marriage certificates, and banned marriages between whites and nonwhites. Both offenses carried a sentence of one year in jail. Read more
The Buffalo Soldier Who Ordered An Artillery Barrage On His Own Position to Save His Comrades. By Samantha Franco / War History
In one of the greatest acts of bravery seen during the Second World War, John R Fox ordered an artillery barrage on his own position to save the lives of his comrades and surrounding civilians. Well aware of the consequences, he made the ultimate sacrifice in the fight against the German enemy.
Better late than never, Fox, an African-American, was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for his gallant actions. Read more
Black twin sisters buy Woodland Plantation, site of the largest US uprising of enslaved people. By Lottie L. Joiner / HuffPost
Jo Banner and Joy Banner, founders of The Descendants Project, acquired Woodland Plantation in LaPlace, Louisiana, with an unwavering commitment to preserving its historical legacy.
The 1811 revolt began at the Woodland Plantation in LaPlace, Louisiana. Charles Deslondes and about 25 other enslaved people attacked Manuel Andry and his son, killing the son. As they marched toward New Orleans, enslaved people from other plantations joined them, with the crowd of rebels growing to more than 500. The group was stopped by the military and captured. Some were put on trial and executed. “They were freedom fighters,” Jo Banner said of the 1811 revolt participants. “They were trying to save their lives and the lives of their family.” Read more
On the Chisholm Trail: Dramatizing the Story of the First Black Woman Presidential Candidate. By Ed Rampell / The Progressive
Netflix’s new biopic chronicles Shirley Chisholm’s trailblazing presidential campaign.
Writer/director John Ridley’s Shirley opens with newly minted Congressmember Shirley Chisholm (Regina King) appearing in early 1969 with her fellow freshman class on the steps of the U.S. Capitol Building—the only woman of color in a sea of overwhelmingly white, male colleagues. The first African American woman ever elected to Congress, Chisholm immediately bucks tradition, butting heads with her patriarchal, racially insensitive fellow members of the House. Read more
Stormy Daniels doc is a portrait of a woman destroyed by Donald Trump. By Jada Yuan / Wash Post
In a new documentary, the adult-film star alleges that the ex-president ‘cornered’ her in a hotel room and details how the fallout tore her life apart
The Stormy Daniels affair that in 2018 consumed Donald Trump’s presidency — after his attorney Michael Cohen violated the law by paying $130,000 to the adult-film star to keep silent — may feel like old news. But it’s far from over. And that was abundantly clear at this month’s South by Southwest premiere of the new documentary “Stormy,” where Daniels arrived as a surprise guest accompanied by two large security guards who surveyed the room at all times. Read more
How Quinta Brunson Hacked the Sitcom. By Molly Fischer / The New Yorker
With “Abbott Elementary,” the comedian and writer found fresh humor and mass appeal in a world she knew well.
At the Emmys, the television luminary Carol Burnett had presented Brunson with her trophy—she was the first Black woman in more than forty years to win the category. Onstage, Brunson had worn a pink crushed-satin Dior dress with a nineteen-fifties-prom-queen silhouette and proclaimed her love for her family, her show, and her medium. “I don’t even know why I’m so emotional,” she said through tears. “I think, like, the Carol Burnett of it all.” Read more
When Pavarotti and Tracy Chapman stunned the world in a soulful operatic duet. By Kyle Macdonald / Classicfm
When two musical worlds come together in a way that may be unexpected, but is undeniably perfect.
In the year 2000, one of Pavarotti’s duet partners was Tracy Chapman. Together at the Pavarotti & Friends for Cambodia and Tibet concert, the pair performed Chapman’s heartfelt 1988 ballad ‘Baby Can I Hold You’ in a coming-together of two musical worlds, with a magical result… Read more and listen here
Sports
The Exploitation of Black Athletes. By Christian Collins / Inside Higher Ed
As March Madness begins, let’s acknowledge the racial exploitation behind college sports, Christian Collins writes.
This year’s National Collegiate Athletic Association’s (NCAA) Division 1 (D1) men’s basketball championship takes place at a contradictory moment for Black male college students. The Supreme Court’s recent ruling banning race-conscious admissions laid bare how, except in limited environments like college athletics, Black men are not viewed as valuable contributors on campuses. But in athletic environments, Black men are overrepresented, especially in the revenue-generating sports of football and basketball. And now, these programs are facing a long overdue athlete-driven and judicially sanctioned reckoning of how they actively exploit athletes. Read more
Black coaches to watch in the 2024 NCAA women’s tournament. By Sean Hurd / Andscape
From Dawn Staley of South Carolina (left) to Niele Ivey of Notre Dame, Black coaches are leading some of the top programs in the country
In recent years, Black head coaches have continued to move the needle in the NCAA women’s basketball tournament. A year ago, four Black coaches advanced to the Sweet 16 in Kenny Brooks (Virginia Tech), Niele Ivey (Notre Dame), Dawn Staley (South Carolina) and Yolett McPhee-McCuin (Ole Miss). Brooks and Staley led their respective teams to the Final Four. It was the second time in NCAA tournament history that two Black coaches led teams to the Final Four in the same year. More importantly, it was the second time in the last three seasons that two Black coaches appeared in the national semifinal. Read more
Howard and coach Kenny Blakeney ready for NCAA First Four after MEAC tournament win.
Bison overcome season of injuries, adversity to reach NCAA tournament spot
Howard University men’s basketball coach Kenny Blakeney has a vision of a starting five he’d like to see take the floor in the school’s NCAA tournament First Four game against Wagner on Tuesday. But the reality of going into the NCAA tournament First Four in a season where Howard has played 13 different starting lineups will likely differ from what he desires. Read more
Muhammad Ali to be Posthumously Inducted Into the WWE Hall of Fame — A Look Back at the Boxing Champ’s Lesser-Known History In Wrestling. By Grace Jidoun / Atlanta Black Star
At just 19, Ali was already an Olympic gold medal boxer and a brash, charismatic young man who wanted to take his career to bigger arenas — and wrestling provided the inspiration.
Muhammad Ali died in 2016, but the influence of the world’s greatest heavyweight boxer still reverberates throughout the sports world in surprising ways. From child advocacy awards to Grammy nominations, this boxing Hall of Famer will soon have another accolade to his name. Ali will be inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame posthumously on April 5, joining Mike Tyson as the only other boxer to receive this honor. Read more
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