Featured
‘Our History Is Our Power’: Maryland Gov. Wes Moore Delivers Commencement Address At Morehouse College. By Melissa Noel / Essence
Moore, who was elected as the first Black governor of Maryland last fall urged 2023 graduates to know their history, celebrate it, and push back against attempts to erase it.
Maryland Gov. Wes Moore delivered the keynote address at Morehouse College in Atlanta on Sunday morning, where he urged 2023 graduates to know their history, celebrate it, and push back against attempts to erase it.
Moore, who was elected as the state’s first Black governor last fall, received an honorary doctorate from the all-male Historically Black College before addressing the 400-plus graduates, their families, and staff members on its Century Campus.
In his speech, the governor used his words to not only encourage graduates but tackle some of the nation’s most polarizing political issues head-on, which he began by acknowledging the past. Read more
Political / Social
What should Black voters think of Tim Scott’s run for president? By Gerren Keith Gaynor / The Grio
The U.S. Senator faces an uphill battle. In his home state of South Carolina, more than 90 percent of Black voters cast their ballot for Biden over Trump.
“Black voters in South Carolina know who Tim Scott is,” Christale Spain, chairwoman of the South Carolina Democratic Party, told the Grio. Spain, elected the first Black woman to lead the state’s Democratic Party earlier this month, said she believes Black voters will reject Scott for his record on critical policy important to the African-American community. Despite his ascension in national politics, Scott’s chances for the presidency are “slim to none,” according to Michael Steele, the former lieutenant governor of Maryland and former chair of the Republican National Committee. “I can’t seriously believe that the gods will move the mountains in a way that says, ‘OK, you’re going to be the last person standing, and the nomination will be yours,’” Steele told the Grio. Read more
Related: Tim Scott’s Vision for America Isn’t for Black People. By Rotimi Adeoye / The Daily Beast
Harlan Crow: Investigating my Clarence Thomas gifts is unconstitutional. By Mark Joseph Stern / Slate
Senate Judiciary Committee member Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse displays a copy of a painting commissioned by Harlan Crow featuring Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas alongside other conservative leaders during a hearing on Capitol Hill on May 2.Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
According to attorneys for billionaire and GOP mega-donor Harlan Crow, however, there is one thing that Congress is absolutely powerless to do: investigate Justice Clarence Thomas for ethics violations. Crow’s lawyers at Gibson Dunn announced this position in a letter on Tuesday sent in response to Senate Judiciary Chairman Dick Durbin’s own inquiries. Durbin, supported by every Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, had asked Crow to provide more information about Crow’s many lavish gifts to Thomas, including private flights, cruises on a superyacht, and all-expenses-paid trips to luxury resorts. Now Crow has, through his lawyers, refused to comply, declaring that the committee has no constitutional authority to investigate the justice’s alleged ethics breaches. Read more
‘We Cannot be Bullied’: Trump Seems Unfazed as His Legal Troubles Grow, But Fani Willis and Letitia James Are the Two Black Women Who Could Take Down the Former President. By Nyamekye Daniel / Atlanta Black Star
Former President Donald Trump has been slammed with several allegations and legal challenges since leaving the White House on the heels of a contentious reelection effort.
Now, while the former reality star remains confident and ahead in the polls among GOP supporters in his latest presidential bid, the scales of justice have been mounting with evidence against him. Leading some of those efforts to punish Trump for his wrongdoings are two Black women — Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and New York Attorney General Letitia James. Read more
A new Daughter of the Confederacy: The hate pageantry of Marjorie Taylor Greene. By Chauncey Devega / Salon
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene is a true daughter of the South in some of the worst ways possible.
Last week, the Georgia congresswoman showed the world, again, that she is a white supremacist who represents the worst of (white) Southern culture and history when she lied about Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., who is a Black man, after they had a public “argument” outside of the Capitol. Greene claimed that she was terrified and felt threatened by her Democratic colleague. Read more
Black lawmakers in Texas criticize bill that seeks to ban DEI offices in higher education. By Nicole Chavez / CNN
Democratic Texas state Rep. Ron Reynolds of Missouri City criticized the passage of legislation that would ban diversity, equity and inclusion offices in higher education.
The Texas House passed a bill Monday aimed at banning diversity, equity and inclusion offices in public colleges and universities, a move that Black leaders say will halt progress and stifle future research funding. The legislation passed in an 83-62 vote and now heads back to the state Senate due to changes made by the House. If the bill passes and is signed by Gov. Greg Abbott, Texas will join other states including Florida and North Dakota that passed laws earlier this year targeting DEI programs, training and funding. Read more
Red States Are Now Weakening Child Labor Laws While Defunding Public Schools. By Glenn Daigon / The Progressive
It’s no coincidence that advocates for loosening child labor restrictions also push for expanding charter schools and voucher programs.
Despite the recent rise in the number of companies found guilty of violating current child labor laws, that has not stopped ten states, mostly red, from passing laws loosening those regulations. How might these laws impact public education? Some recent studies show they could potentially have a devastating impact on both graduation rates and attendance. Read more
Related: 717,000 Black children could be missing out on Social Security payments. By Bo Erickson / CBS News
Fewer Black, Latino and male students want to go to college, survey shows. By Edwin Flores / NBC News
73% of Latino and 74% of Black students surveyed said they want to go to college, down from 79% for both groups in 2019.
The “Class of 2023: Who Plans to Go to College?” report published Monday by YouthTruth, a national nonprofit organization that conducts education surveys, canvassed 25,000 respondents from 223 schools in 21 states. While 73% of Latino students surveyed said they wanted to go to college, the number represented a 6% drop since 2019, while 64% said they expected to go to college. Black students saw a similar gap — 74% said they want to go, down 5% since 2019, while 66% said they expected to go. Read more
The Good News on Unemployment for Black Americans. By Paul Krugman / NYT
In a recent article that stressed America’s impressive recovery from the Covid economic slump, I compared current conditions with those in late 1988, when George H.W. Bush won an electoral landslide in part because of the perception that the economy was in great shape.
As I noted, inflation at the time was roughly what it is now, while the unemployment rate was about two points higher. What I didn’t point out was that unemployment was especially high among disadvantaged groups, especially Black Americans. And one of the relatively unsung bright points of the U.S. economy in recent years has been a reduction in Black unemployment. Read more
A census mistake reveals surprising details about U.S. Hispanics and Latinos. By Andrew Van Dam / Wash Post
If “Hispanic” were an ordinary ancestry, it would easily be America’s most common, well ahead of German. But it’s not. It’s a fantastically broad term whose meaning swerves and sways depending on whom — and where — you’re asking.
For years, Census Bureau figures have shown that only about 3 percent of Brazilian-born U.S. residents claim to be Hispanic or Latino. But a whopping 70 percent of Brazilian-born Americans claimed “Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin” in the bureau’s 2020 American Community Survey. The enormous Brazil-shaped hole in our data fosters systemic discrimination, Costa said, adding that Brazilians are often overlooked by targeted efforts of all kinds, including in the health-care sector. That would change, researchers told us, if they were officially categorized as Latino, one of America’s most influential demographic groups. Read more
Ethics /Morality / Religion
DeSantis’ deal with the devil: Chasing the Christian right won’t help him. By Heather Digby Parton / Salon
DeSantis’ chances of winning the election once the country learns of his radical record are worse than Trump’s
So, what’s going on here? Why has he lurched so far to the right that he’s on the verge of falling off the edge? It’s because of the religious right. As long as I can remember, it’s been a truism that America is an extremely pious country and great deference must be paid to traditional Christian values. In recent years we learned that the conservative evangelical commitment to those same Christian values was more than a little bit overstated when the Republican Party offered up an openly promiscuous, thrice-married, sexual assaulting, libertine for president and they eagerly joined his flock. It’s now clear that these Americans are not really a religious group at all but rather a political faction. Read more
Republicans are trying to drown us in religion. By Kuro Kirjava / Daily Kos
We need to address the elephant in the room: the encroaching waves of religion in our public and political spaces. It’s time to look this issue squarely in the eye and grapple with its consequential threat to our democracy.
In the United States, we often take our religious freedoms for granted, secure in the constitutional protections of the First Amendment. We are free to worship (or not) in any manner we choose, an essential liberty. However, an alarming trend has gradually unfolded, where these freedoms are distorted, weaponized, and exploited for political gains. Read more
Meet the organization preserving and promoting the stories of Black Methodists. By Emily McFarian Miller / RNS
The congregation of East Calvary Methodist Episcopal Church gathers for worship in Philadelphia. Photo © United Methodist Commission on Archives and History.
When most people think of the United Methodist Church, Carol Travis said, they don’t picture Black people. “People still think that the United Methodist Church is white,” said Travis. “You don’t see enough Black faces even though we have been there from the beginning. We never left.” The African American Methodist Heritage Center, where Travis is executive assistant, aims to change that image. Read more
She Was Born into Slavery. She Became a Missionary to Africa at 56. By K. A. Ellis / Christianity Today
How an American school teacher spread God’s love in King Leopold’s Congo.
As a young child growing up enslaved on an Alabama plantation, Fearing had no idea that the God who created her would liberate her from physical and spiritual slavery, or that she would one day travel across seas to the shores of Africa, carrying that message of freedom and new life to those who lived on the same continent as her ancestors. Read more
Historical / Cultural
Black Resistance and Slave Politics in Lowcountry Georgia. By Karen Cook Bell / AAIHS
W. E. B. Du Bois, Collector. African Americans standing outside of a church. Georgia, 1899. [or 1900] Photograph. (NYPL)
The arrival of over 13,000 Africans in Lowcountry Georgia led to the creation of a new language structure, the Gullah/Geechee language, which had a common semantic and stylistic form. This shared language made possible the reclamation of a territory to establish a sense of place. The cultural identity of these forced transatlantic communities emanated from shared traditions, perspectives; and intersecting relations and languages. Building on both their African background and American experience, Africans in Lowcountry Georgia retained their African culture and established cultural resistance to their enslavement. Read more
The Last-Known ‘Colored’ School in Manhattan Becomes a Landmark. By Lola Fadulu / NYT
For years, New York City Department of Sanitation workers ate their lunch in a three-story yellow brick building on West 17th Street in Chelsea without knowing its history: It was once a “colored” school that served Black Americans during racial segregation in New York City public schools.
On Tuesday, the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission voted to designate the building, which had been known as Colored School No. 4, a protected landmark, and city officials said they would provide $6 million to rehabilitate it. “We stand on the shoulders of the young men and women that attended this school, and while they may be gone, I am honored to ensure they will never be forgotten,” Mayor Eric Adams said in a statement. Read more
The Cultural Legacy Behind ‘Blaxit’ — And How It Informed Our Choice to Leave The U.S. By Imani Bashir / HuffPost
We owe it to our ancestors who took their talent abroad — Audre Lorde, Josephine Baker, James Baldwin — to find a place where we can creatively thrive.
Moving to a new country can stimulate personal development and emotional growth — especially for artists looking for creative inspiration. For Black Americans, however, this move can present a special set of challenges that stem from a long history of institutionalized racism, discrimination and oppression. We know, however, from the stories of our ancestors, that it can be worth it. Read more
The First 10 Words of the African American English Dictionary Are In. By Sandra E. Garcia / NYT
An exclusive look at a dictionary consisting entirely of words created or reinvented by Black people. (Don’t worry: All three variants of “bussin” are included.). Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr., a decorated scholar of Black history and culture, is the editor in chief of the Oxford Dictionary of African American English.
In a recent online presentation, editors and researchers working on a first-of-its-kind dictionary of African American English gave a status update on the project. As academics explained their various methodologies, slides displayed behind them showed words that are more often associated with Twitter than Oxford: “Bussin,” virtual attendees were told, means impressive or tasty, while a “boo” is a lover. Read more
A Florida School Has Banned the Poem Read at Biden’s Inauguration. By Tori Otten / The New Republic
Amanda Gorman’s “The Hill We Climb” is restricted after just one parent complained about it.
A parent of two students at the Bob Graham Education Center in Miami Lakes challenged Amanda Gorman’s The Hill We Climb and four other books in March, arguing they were not age-appropriate. Bob Graham covers grades kindergarten through eight. Daily Salinas said that The Hill We Climb, The ABCs of Black History, Cuban Kids, Countries in the News Cuba, and Love to Langston contained references to critical race theory, gender ideology, “indirect hate messages,” and “indoctrination,” especially of socialism. She requested they be removed from the school entirely, according to documents shared by the Florida Freedom to Read Project. Read more
Does ‘The Little Mermaid’ Pass the Black Princess Test? By Sam Sanders / Vulture
When the trailer for The Little Mermaid live-action remake came out last year, reaction videos of Black little girls watching Halle Bailey as Ariel went viral. Bailey recently talked about the importance of her casting to Good Morning America: “I mean, we deserve to have representation where we can look and say, ‘Wow, I’m worthy too. She looks like me.’”
Aria Halliday studies cultural constructions of Black girlhood and womanhood at the University of Kentucky and helped us establish this very academic criteria: (1) there has to be a Black princess; (2) Black cultural traditions should be represented; and (3) the rewards for the Black princess should be just as good as they typically are for white princesses. Read more
Beyoncé And Jay-Z Purchase Los Angeles Mansion For $200 Million—The Most Expensive Home In California’s History. By Emma Reynolds / Forbes
The concrete home overlooks the Pacific Ocean and has striking features, an expansive lawn on either side, and plenty of privacy for the ultra-famous family of five.
The calming retreat is both simple and tranquil—surely a respite from both of the musician’s busy lifestyle. Knowles is currently in Europe on her Renaissance World Tour, which is estimated to rake in nearly $2 billion. Just this year, she claimed the title for the most Grammy wins of all time. Read more
Spike Lee’s fellowship gives HBCU students a role in Hollywood. By Tariro Mzezewa / Wash Post
We want this thing to be a legacy,” Spike Lee said at an event honoring the inaugural class of the Spike Fellows Program at the Johnson Lowe Gallery in Atlanta. (Elijah Nouvelage for The Washington Post). Shown is the inaugural class.
The fellowship is paid, and the fellows will be given $25,000 for student debt relief. The inaugural class of fellows will spend this summer working in the Gersh Agency’s New York or Los Angeles offices, and at the end of the summer, each fellow will decide which office and department they would like to be placed in for the next year, when their fellowship becomes a full-time job. Read more
Martin Scorsese’s ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ stirs emotion at Cannes. By Jada Yuan / Wash Post
Surrounded by members of the Osage Nation, the director received a 10-minute standing ovation for ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ that he said was like nothing he’d ever experienced before
And unlike the endless chances one has to see in-competition movies, the Scorsese film — based on David Grann’s nonfiction book of the same name, about a string of murders of members of the Osage Nation in 1920s Oklahoma known as the Reign of Terror, which became the marquee case of the newly formed FBI — would play just once for the public. There was just one shot at being in the room for that premiere for a film that isn’t scheduled to open in theaters until Oct. 20. Read more
Sports
LeBron James weighing NBA retirement shouldn’t be a surprise. By Dan Wolken / USA Today
LeBron James could not beat the Denver Nuggets in the Western Conference finals but managed to wrestle away most of the attention from their 4-0 sweep when he suggested that returning for a 21st NBA season was no sure thing.
“We’ll see what happens going forward. I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve got a lot to think about, to be honest, and just with me personally going forward with the game of basketball, I’ve got a lot to think about.” This comment has caught a lot of fans off guard. That’s partly because of the assumption that James could continue to defy nature by his sheer will and partly because he has stated many times that he wants to play alongside his son Bronny before retirement. Read more
Saving $7,800,000 in Agent Fee, Lamar Jackson’s Mom Went Michael Jordan’s Mother Deloris’ Way While Negotiating for Her Son’s Contract. By Shubham Bhargav / The Sports Rush
A little while ago, Lamar Jackson was getting advice from almost everyone who follows football about what to do in order to get a favorable deal. Some advised him to lower down his aspirations, while some reprimanded him for not hiring an agent and trusting his mom with deal negotiation duties. However, shutting down all such voices, Lamar secured the biggest contract in league history, on yearly salary basis. Not only this, as his mom was his agent, Jackson ended up saving tonnes of cash. Without a doubt, Lamar’s mom Felicia’s active role in all this, reminds us of the role Michael Jordan’s mom played in helping him sign the biggest deal of his life. Read more
When Magic Johnson’s Son Came Out, His Reaction Shocked the World. By Sollyanna / Sports Bonanza
When EJ Johnson finally came out as gay, his famous father didn’t react in the way we all might have expected.
Magic Johnson opened up to the New York Times about the real reason behind his reaction. Because the truth was, he wasn’t disappointed in his son for being gay—far from it! What he was sad about, was that he had his own painful memories of being ostracized and stigmatized after his HIV diagnosis. He knew that people in the world still had the same hang-ups about being gay—and he wanted to protect his son from how hard this might be. Read more
Stephen Curry wins Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Social Justice Champion Award. By Martenzie Johnson / Andscape and ESPN
The honor, named after the six-time NBA MVP and No. 2 on the career scoring list, is given to the player who best embodies Abdul-Jabbar’s message of civil rights, Black empowerment and racial equality.
Curry — a four-time NBA champion and two-time MVP — was selected based on his work in advocating for voting rights, gender and racial equity in sports, and food scarcity in underserved communities. Read more
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