Two years ago today, George Floyd pleaded for air, his mother, and his life. With tragic irony, he also breathed new energy into the movement for civil rights and Black lives. At that very moment, his fellow African Americans were also dying from COVID, at twice the national rate of…

Laying the Blame for Buffalo Where it Belongs — In June 2015, President Barack Obama stood at the podium at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston and started to sing. Obama delivered the eulogy for the Reverend Clementa Pinckney, murdered with eight other Black members of his congregation, all gunned down by a white supremacist who…

The Fight for our Bodies, Our Voice, Our Lives — This country has never been for us. We were property sold by fathers to husbands, changing our surnames from one patriarch to the next. We could not inherit, own a house, or conduct business without a man by our side until the 19th Century. …

American football is a plantation industry. The majority-Black workforce sacrifices body and soul. The white owners and the league make billions. I love football. I grew up loving it. Because my father loved it. He loved it because it made it possible for him to go to college. For free. He also loved football because it taught him dignity and discipline, strength, and power. Football taught him to believe in himself…

With the resignation of Justice Breyer, President Biden has his first opportunity to name a justice to the United States Supreme Court. “I’m looking forward to making sure there’s a black woman on the Supreme Court,” Biden promised during the 2020 presidential campaign, “to make sure we, in fact, get…

Thurgood Marshall Wants You To Get To Work A little girl is walking to school. She walks many blocks. Then she walks through the railroad yards. Eventually, she crosses a busy avenue, only to stand and wait. And wait. And wait, as the sun comes up, for the bus to arrive. The bus then carries her the mile…

My father died five years ago today. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about him, more than once. I am the person I am — for better or worse — because of who he was. And who he raised me to be. These are the things my father taught me: How to make…

Everyone is talking about the Supreme Court’s big Indian Law decision. But here’s what’s missing from the conversation: Black People The United States Supreme Court ruled last week that much of eastern Oklahoma falls within the Muscogee (Creek) Indian reservation. The 5–4 decision, in McGirt v. Oklahoma is perhaps the significant legal victory for Native Americans in a generation. It will have broad implications for Native people who live across…

It started in the earliest days of our Republic. First, they came for us on the Continent. We were hunted trapped, enslaved and imported as cargo from Senegambia (today’s Senegal, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau and Mali) and west-central Africa, including what is now Angola, Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Gabon…