Featured
R. Kelly Found Guilty On All Counts In Sexual Abuse Trial. By Alanna Vagianos and Taryn Finley / HuffPost
R. Kelly, the R&B singer who rose to fame in the 1990s, has been found guilty on all charges related to racketeering and sex trafficking after a trial at the Brooklyn Federal Courthouse. After nine hours of deliberation, a jury of seven men and five women found Kelly guilty on one count of racketeering and eight counts of violating the Mann Act, which prohibits transporting individuals across state lines for the purpose of prostitution.
The racketeering charge included 14 different acts. In order to be found guilty on the racketeering charge, the prosecution had to prove just two of those acts to the jury. The jury found Kelly guilty on 12 of the 14 acts, meaning he was found overwhelmingly guilty on the racketeering charge. Read more
Related: R. Kelly conviction: Black women are the face of sex trafficking. By Faith Huckel Motter / USA Today
Related: “Surviving R. Kelly” executive producer reacts to guilty verdict. By Analisa Novak / CBS News
Related: The R. Kelly verdict leaves unhealed wounds. By Justin Tinsley / The Undefeated
Related: Bill Cosby and Chuck D. Weigh In on R. Kelly Following Guilty Verdict. Shanelle Genal / The Root
Political / Social
Tim Scott Turns Against His Own Police-Reform Plan. By Jonathan Chait / NY Mag
Last year, in the wake of George Floyd’s grisly murder at the hands of Derek Chauvin, Senator Tim Scott was filled with idealistic passion on the need for police reform. Scott, a Republican, had a pragmatic idea. Police departments would have to follow basic federal standards on some practices, like banning choke holds and no-knock warrants, or else they would lose federal funding. Tying federal grants to reform used to be his idea; now he calls it “defunding the police.” Read more
The Unbearable Whiteness of the Democratic Party…and America. By Michael Harriot / The Root
There is an open secret that most of your favorite activists know, even if they never mention it during their television appearances: Black people are on their own.
Throughout the course of American history, most white people have never cared about Black lives. This has nothing to do with Critical Race Theory. It is an indisputable fact. While there are no polling numbers on how Americans felt about slavery, most white people did not participate in the abolition movement. Even after the Supreme Court 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, only 18 percent of whites favored immediate integration, according to the National Opinion Research Center. A 1963 Gallup poll found that 78 percent of white people would leave their neighborhood if many Black families moved in. By 1966, 54 percent of white Americans said that they did not think civil rights demonstrations were justified, even if they “were in the same position as negroes.” Read more
The plot against democracy: how Texas Republicans plan to steal power from minority voters. Sam levine / The Guardian
The political and demographic future of America will look like what Fort Bend county looks like now, demographers believe. The county is extremely diverse – about 32% of people are white, 25% are Hispanic or Latino, 21% are Asian and 21% are Black. And its population exploded over the last decade, growing by 40% to about 823,000 people. But this fall, Republicans could blunt the remarkable transformation happening in Fort Bend county, across Texas, and places around the US seeing similar changes. Read more
Wisconsin Republicans Enforce Cursive but Not Race. By Henry Redman / The Progressive
Republicans in the Wisconsin State Assembly passed a slate of bills on September 28 that would reshape curricula in public schools while attempting, again, to wrench control over federal pandemic relief aid from Governor Tony Evers. The education-related bills passed on total or near party line votes and are almost certain to be vetoed by Governor Evers. The bills would ban the teaching of so-called critical race theory in classrooms, require cursive to be taught to elementary school students, institute a civics requirement for Wisconsin schools, and spend $100 million in COVID-19 relief funds on mental health programs for students. Read more
Racial disparity gap closing over COVID vaccines. By Christal Hayes, Ryan W. Miller and Grace Hauck / USA Today
The gap in racial disparities in COVID-19 vaccination rates is closing, according to new survey data released Tuesday. A Kaiser Family Foundation survey found 73% of Hispanic adults, 71% of white adults and 70% of Black adults in the U.S. had already received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. Earlier in the nation’s vaccination efforts, data showed a much wider gap among vaccination rates between different racial and ethnic groups, driven by barriers to access and misconceptions, Nunez-Smith said. The new data is “the result of intentional work to address those barriers, to address those concerns,” she said. Read more
The Racist ‘Great Replacement’ Conspiracy Theory Is Becoming A Mainstream GOP Talking Point. By Matt Shuham / TPM
Last week, Tucker Carlson taught his millions of primetime viewers about something he referred to as the official policy of the Biden administration: “The great replacement,” Carlson said. “The replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from far-away countries.” Carlson had just finished commenting on the “flood” of Haitian asylum seekers at the border. He said the situation was “awful on every level” before implying that the Haitians would overwhelm America’s hospitals and schools. Then, he said the “suicidal” policy was, in fact, all part of a more sinister plan. The blatant racism that followed used to be at least slightly taboo among right-wing elites. Not anymore. Read more
We Underestimated Trump Before. It Didn’t Go Well. Jamelle Bouie / NYT
It’s almost as if, to the people with the power to act, the prospect of a Trumpified Republican Party with the will to subvert the next presidential election and the power to do it is one of those events that just seems a little too out there. And far from provoking action, the sheer magnitude of what it would mean has induced a kind of passivity, a hope that we can solve the crisis without bringing real power to bear. Read more
Montana Tribe Finalizes Historic $1.9 Billion Settlement. By Mark Armao / Mother Jones
After decades of negotiations, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes (CSKT) have finalized a $1.9 billion water rights settlement that resolves thousands of tribal claims tied to waterways throughout western Montana. U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland signed the long-pending water compact last week, executing a complex agreement that confirms CSKT’s water rights and authorizes funding to modernize a federal irrigation project comprising 1,300 miles of aging canals also known as the Flathead Indian Irrigation Project. The agreement, which was initially introduced in Congress in 2016 before being passed last year, also provides funding for habitat restoration and transfers control of the National Bison Range to the tribes. Read more
Related: Cherokee Nation Reaches $75 Million Settlement Over Opioid Lawsuit. By Nick Visser / HuffPost
Obama says presidential center will invest in community, empower youth.
The Obama Presidential Center will provide economic investment and opportunities for young people on Chicago’s South Side, President Barack Obama said an interview with “Good Morning America” co-anchor Robin Roberts ahead of the center’s grand opening. Obama has a personal connection to the area; he said that he first “learned how to work in public service as a community organizer” and announced a run for political office in the South Side. Read more
Ibram X. Kendi, Artist Jordan Casteel, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor Among 2021 MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grant Winners. By Maiysha Kai / The Root
Kendi joins an illustrious and extremely diverse group of 25 MacArthur fellows this year, each of whom also receive a “no-strings-attached” $625,000 “genius” grant from the foundation. Among the 11 Black fellows on this year’s list are artist Daniel Lind-Ramos; poet and lawyer Reginald Dwayne Betts; essayist and poet Hanif Abdurraqib; writer and curator Nicole R. Fleetwood (author of the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award-winning Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration; civil rights activist Desmond Meade, biological physicist Ibrahim Cissé; historian and writer Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, and film scholar, archivist, and curator Jacqueline Stewart. Painter Jordan Casteel is the youngest fellow at 32, while the oldest is 70-year-old Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, founder of Urban Bush Women. Read more
Black women will be inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for the first time. By Scottie Andrew / CNN
The National Inventors Hall of Fame lineup is full of familiar faces: Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, the Wright brothers and Eli Whitney, along with many other mostly White men. Joining them in the next class of inductees are two Black women inventors who changed the way we work and see. Marian Croak and the late Dr. Patricia Bath will be inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, alongside the inventors of the sports bra, ibuprofen and the Super Soaker toy. They’re the first two Black women to earn a spot in the Hall of Fame. Croak, now a vice president at Google, developed Voice over Internet Protocol, the technology that’s made working from home possible for many. And Bath created the Laserphaco Probe, a device used during surgery to easily remove cataracts. Read more
How civil rights activist Howard Fuller became a devout champion of school choice. By Jon Hale / The Conversation
As a longtime civil rights activist and education reformer, Howard Fuller has seen his support for school choice spark both controversy and confusion. That’s because it aligns him with polarizing Republican figures that include Donald Trump and Trump’s former secretary of education, Betsy DeVos. But unlike those figures, Fuller’s support for school choice is not rooted in a conservative agenda to privatize public schools. Rather, it is grounded in his ongoing quest to provide Black students a quality education by any means necessary. I write about Fuller in my new book “The Choice We Face,” which traces the history of school choice as well as demands for radical education reform by Black activists. Read more
Historical / Cultural
When Black History Is Unearthed, Who Gets to Speak for the Dead? By Jill Lepore / The New Yorker
Efforts to rescue African American burial grounds and remains have exposed deep conflicts over inheritance and representation. At least fifteen hundred African Americans are buried in Geer Cemetery, in Durham, North Carolina. Only two hundred headstones now remain, but locals are painstakingly working to reconstruct the site’s population and to restore its grounds. Read more
In Oak Bluffs, Strangers Become Family.
Approaching Inkwell Beach on Martha’s Vineyard on a midsummer day, you feel a magnetic energy in the air. Before you can even see the ocean, familiar melodies waft through a set of speakers, everything from Beyoncé to Earth, Wind & Fire. Once on the small beach, steps from the main strip of Oak Bluffs, you are surrounded by Black beachgoers. A first-time visitor to this Martha’s Vineyard town, long cherished by generations of Black travelers, finds that after a devastating year, warm welcomes, a strong sense of pride and the spirit of family remain constants. Read more
My grandmother left South Carolina during Jim Crow. My trip there taught me about her — and me. By Laylah Amatullah Barrayn / The Lily
Like many Black Americans, my grandmother Juanita left the South. She joined the millions of foot soldiers who were part of the Great Migration — a period that lasted from the early 1900s to the mid-1970s, when Jim Crow laws made life unbearable. I never knew exactly what led her to one day board a Greyhound bus from South Carolina to New York City. It could have been one or many unforgivable racist encounters; or maybe it was dispatches from the storied big cities that set her heart on fire in search of new dreams. Read more
The Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka’s First Novel Since 1973.
In the first pages of his poignant 2006 memoir, “You Must Set Forth at Dawn,” Wole Soyinka quotes an old piece of Yoruba wisdom: “As one approaches an elder’s status, one ceases to indulge in battles.” In the 15 years that have since gone by, Soyinka has stubbornly refused that advice. As a political activist, the 87-year-old Nobel Prize winner has never stopped intervening in our public conversation, whether to defend freedom of expression, condemn religious fundamentalism or destroy his American green card after the election of Donald Trump.
His latest work, “Chronicles From the Land of the Happiest People on Earth” is at once political satire and murder mystery, and a lament for the spirit of his native Nigeria. Read more
The Other Side of Black Success in Martin Kilson’s Odyssey. By Joshua L. Crutchfield / AAIHS
One of the earliest childhood memories of the late Martin Kilson is that of his father, Reverend Martin Luther Kilson Sr., pastor of the small Emanuel Methodist Church in Ambler, Pennsylvania. Kilson recalled how his father and Emanuel Church served Ambler’s working-class Black communities during the Great Depression by giving “chickens or dozens of eggs to poor families in the church.”
Emanuel Church and other Black institutions like it functioned as an alternative support system for Black people throughout the Jim Crow Era and during the Great Depression. Martin Kilson, in his memoir, A Black Intellectual’s Odyssey: From a Pennsylvania Milltown to the Ivy League, credits these Black institutions with his unique sojourn from the small Pennsylvanian communities of Ambler and Penllyn (the borough Ambler and the nearby village Penllyn are often collectively referred to as Ambler-Penllyn) to his time at Harvard where he became the first tenured Black faculty member in 1969. Read more
‘Dear White People’ creator says racism’s ‘evergreen’ presence keeps series relevant. By Lamar Dawson / NBC News
Much has changed since the “Dear White People” movie premiered in theaters in January 2014, but many things — including the pervasiveness of racism — have remained the same, according to the creator of the film and subsequent TV series. “That’s the thing about racism,” Justin Simien told NBC News. “It’s evergreen.” The film, about Black students at an Ivy League college, debuted in the middle of President Barack Obama’s second term, when, according to Simien, “it was taboo for liberal white people to talk about racism.” The Netflix series, now in its fourth and final season, first dropped in April 2017, during the Trump administration and well into the Black Lives Matter movement. Read more
Sports
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Offers Harsh Solution For NBA’s Vaccine Refusers. By Ron Dicker / HuffPost
NBA great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar slammed the league’s vaccine refusers for endangering teammates, and said the players should be banned. “The NBA should insist that all players and staff are vaccinated or remove them from the team,” Abdul-Jabbar told Rolling Stone recently. “There is no room for players who are willing to risk the health and lives of their teammates, the staff and the fans simply because they are unable to grasp the seriousness of the situation or do the necessary research.” Read more
Robin Montgomery, the future of women’s tennis. By Jerry Bembrey / The Undefeated
In September, Montgomery proved Agnamba a soothsayer. Just days after turning 17, Montgomery had quite the Saturday on Sept. 11, winning the US Open junior girls’ singles title in the afternoon, followed by the US Open junior girls’ doubles title that evening. It’s the first sweep of those US Open titles since 2004, and the first sweep by an American since Lindsay Davenport accomplished the feat in 1992. For Montgomery, those matches denoted the end of one chapter — it was the last time she competed as a junior — and the introduction to the next, as she begins her full-time professional career beginning in October. Read more
Lewis Hamilton’s legacy will be about more than 100 victories. By Andrew Lawrence / The Undefeated
In the unforgiving world of Formula One, Lewis Hamilton abides at the top. He’s the man to beat, the top earner, the most important voice, the most prominent figure — a Black man alone at the summit of motorsports’ highest echelon. England’s knight in Mercedes armor.
Over the past 15 years, the 36-year-old Briton has won seven world championships, tying the record set by Ferrari’s Michael Schumacher — the German F1 driver who was regarded as the greatest of all time until Hamilton broadsided him from that perch. At Sunday’s Russian Grand Prix, Hamilton rallied through a late rain shower to claim the checkered flag on the way to becoming the first driver in the sport’s history with 100 career victories. And that’s besides his 100 career pole positions. As achievements go in racing, this is beyond otherworldly. Read more
Teenage basketball stars are making big money before they even get to the NBA. By Christian Red / NBC News
At 16 years old, Tyler Smith is 6-foot-9 and has the kind of basketball skills that make college coaches swoon. But he has given up his future NCAA eligibility — and his last two years of high school. Instead, he’s going pro.
Smith, who is from the Houston area, and 23 other of the brightest young players in the U.S. and abroad have signed to play in a new basketball league — Overtime Elite — which launched in March and is part of Overtime, a media company that started in 2015 with an app that featured highlights of amateur basketball action. Each Overtime Elite player will earn $100,000 a year, train year-round at state-of-the art facilities, take classes in financial literacy and social activism and be coached by Kevin Ollie, a former University of Connecticut star and NBA veteran. Read more
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