A number of Black girls and women have gone missing in Chicago. Families are pleading for answers to the disappearances and a local activist community is taking note.
According to research from the National Endowment for the Arts, poetry readership is on the rise. A staggering 28 million adults read poetry last year, per the NEA’s Survey of Public Participation in the Arts which places this number as the highest it has ever been in the last 15 years of conducting the survey. […]
By Stanley Fritz Last year during Mother’s day weekend, the National Bail out Collective, a coalition of black organizers working, including participants from The Movement for Black Lives and multiple affiliated groups joined forces on an initiative whose main goal was to liberate hundreds of mothers and caregivers who had fallen victim to the criminal justice […]
Editor’s Note: A version of this piece was previously published on The Each Other Project I learned to swim well before I was 14 by taking classes at the local YMCA in East Cleveland. If that rec center was the only frame of reference, you’d think swimming was an exclusively Black phenomenon, the pool being […]
In a 1967 speech at Stanford University, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. laid out his case for a basic guaranteed income as a moral imperative for a country of capitalists. King would later more fully develop this idea in his last book Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community in which he remarks: Up […]
In 2014, Gregory Hill, a 30 year old Black man, was shot three times and killed by police in his Florida garage after complaints of loud music. To add insult to injury, last week, a federal jury awarded his family a $4 verdict in their civil case.
Rap beefs have long become a cultural staple of hip-hop, from Tupac vs. Biggie, Jay Z vs. Nas, to Remy Ma vs. Nicki Minaj. The latest rap beef to capture hip-hop fans actually erupted a decade ago, when both rappers Pusha-T and Drake taking occasional shots at each other due to several incidents with their competing […]
by Josie Pickens I first met my good friend—my sister—Hadeel through another mutual friend some years ago. Around that time, I was researching Black American towns destroyed by White vigilantes, and who were often aided by local and national governments.  She was a shorty like me, of five feet and a few inches. Wild, […]
Last month during a congressional hearing, US Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families acting assistant secretary Steven Wagner told Congress that his agency was unable to account for 1,475 children who had been placed with sponsors between October and December of 2017. Though all the children unaccounted for showed up […]
Morgan Freeman, the 80-year-old actor perhaps who became a household name after his roles in Driving Miss Daisy and Along Came a Spider is the latest to face a reckoning with sexual misconduct and sexual harassment according to multiple reports. Freeman is also being accused of fostering a work environment at his company Revelations Entertainment […]
by Tonya McKenzie This essay contains discussions and descriptions of sexual violence, child abuse, and murder There are some things that you never forget, like the sound of a car screeching down the street and slamming into one of your neighbors or the bombastic sound of a gunshot and the sight of the damage that […]
A native of South Bronx, Saraciea Fennell has been a longtime supporter of the area’s literary scene. The creator of The Bronx is Reading, which works to foster an interest in reading in Bronx children using author events and book donations, Fennell noticed a need for increased literary prominence in the area after its last remaining […]