#african-americans

#african-americans

In 1977, Lawanda Jackson and Darcelle XV got dressed up and went downtown."My best girl, she let me borrow her Jefferson High School cheerleading costume.Darcelle had all her white hair, in her glory.We made the news but it wasn't easy."Jackson told the Mercury."They called her all kinds of things, N-word-lover.

Juneteenth not only became a federal holiday in 2021, but the Los Angeles City Council also voted last week that June 19 is an official day off for city workers.Juneteenth commemorates the emancipation of enslaved African Americans, and specifically observes when the news reached Galveston, Texas, more than two years after President Abraham Lincoln issued an executive order "that all persons held as slaves" within the rebellious states "are, and henceforward shall be free."

Randall Robinson, a self-described pained victim of stolen identity raised in segregated Virginia who grew up to galvanize Americans against apartheid in South Africa and champion reparations for the descendants of slaves, died on Friday in Basseterre, on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts, where he had lived in self-imposed exile from the United States for more than two decades.

It's become axiomatic in our political discourse that one of the reasons the anti-abortion crowd became so powerfully persuasive in the decades after Roe is that claiming to speak for a fetus is rhetorically unassailable.If every fertilized egg is a human life, nobody can claim to understand its preferences and hopes and dreams, so substituting the voice of the movement is a simple matter: All fertilized eggs want to live and thrive, goes the theory.

Between Father's Day, Juneteenth, and the upcoming summer solstice, there are plenty of events to keep you busy this weekend.Read on for our worthy-yet-wallet-friendly picks, from to and from to the .JUNETEENTH
LIVE MUSIC
The Downhill Jam: Tony Hawk's Pro Skater CoverbandThe Downhill Jam is a Birdman-approved tribute band that jams your favorite songs from Tony Hawk's Pro Skater video game series (the band has even appeared on Hawk's podcast Hawk Vs Wolf!) Mosh along to classics from Goldfinger, Lagwagon, Dead Kennedys, Public Enemy, and more.

Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott signed a bill Wednesday that bans diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) offices at public colleges and universities across the state, his spokesperson confirmed to CNN.The state legislature passed the bill last month largely along party lines with supporters arguing that DEI efforts promote racial profiling and slashing funds for such programs will save taxpayers millions of dollars.

The chatty daytime talk show The View might seem like an unlikely platform for Tim Scott, a senator from South Carolina and a presidential candidate, to get his footing with Republican primary voters, but he saw an opening on Monday and tried to make the most of it.Mr. Scott, the first Black Republican from the South elected to the Senate since Reconstruction, had asked for an audience on the show after a co-host, Joy Behar, said Mr. Scott doesn't get it when he denies the existence of systemic racism, which is why, she said, he is a Republican.

President Joe Biden is set to announce on Thursday that he will nominate Air Force chief of staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown as the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to a defense official familiar with the plans.The decision follows Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin's recommendation to pick Brown as the military's next top officer, the official said.

California is often cited as a bastion of left-leaning politics, with an electorate that voted for Joe Biden over Donald Trump by a nearly 2-1 ratio in 2020.But a study of the state's high schools shows that California campuses are just as likely to experience political strife as those in other, more polarized states.

Juneteenth is a bittersweet holiday that marks the day when, on June 19, 1865, the last enslaved African Americans in Galveston found out they were free - two and a half years after Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation that was issued to end slavery.Though this is only the third year the holiday has been federally recognized (President Joe Biden signed it into law in June 2021), Juneteenth, also known as Jubilee Day, Emancipation Day, or Freedom Day, has been celebrated by Houstonians for decades.

Amina, the celebrated 70-seat Old City restaurant which opened last May by first-time restaurateur Felicia Wilson, is launching a special "Fried Chicken & Prosecco" Wednesday night fundraiser at the restaurant located at 104 Chestnut Street in Philadelphia's Old City neighborhood.The special, which is available now through the end of March 2023, features $5 glasses of prosecco available with the restaurant's Fried Chicken Basket entree, which comes with hand-cut fries, soul slaw and sweet n' sassy sauce and is priced at $26. 100% of the proceeds from prosecco sales will benefit the African American Museum of Philadelphia through the end of March.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

Several Los Angeles police officers were justified when they shot at and killed a man who brandished a handgun, but six of their colleagues broke department policy by joining in the barrage of gunfire last July, according to a police oversight panel.The civilian Police Commission found late last month that four of the 10 officers - Luis Avalos, Garrett Vanhooser, Christopher Gonzalez and Chad Heistermann - who opened fire on Rudolfo Torres were within policy.

Fulbeck recalled that Daniel, who could be a bit of a hermit, also lit up in front of a classroom."He had this amazing ability to captivate a room," Fulbeck said."He was just such a vibrant and charismatic lecturer, so passionate about what he was doing and always so poised."Daniel brought that enthusiasm and joy to his work until he died suddenly in November 2022.

The silhouette AR-15-style rifle is displayed on signage for the Firearms Unknown Guns & Ammo gun store in Yuma, Ariz., last week.Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images Gun deaths in the United States reached an all-time high in 2021 for the second year in a row, with firearms violence the single leading cause of death for children and young adults, according to a new study released by Johns Hopkins University.

Brisket is a classic cut of meat for the low and slow cook.Joel Villanueva/Getty Images Editor's note: Goats and Soda usually covers stories about the Global South and sometimes looks at how life there holds lessons for all of us.In this story in the Weekly Dose of Wonder series, we look at a culinary technique that had the opposite trajectory: With roots in the Americas, it has spread out around the globe.

Three things of note to a particular slice of American culture occurred in recent weeks: On February 5th, the Grammy Awards, which were initially reluctant to embrace the genre of hip-hop, recognized the fiftieth anniversary of its existence.(To the extent that something as complex and sprawling as a musical genre can find a single point of origin, hip-hop was born in the summer of 1973, at a fabled party thrown by DJ Kool Herc, at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, in the Bronx.)

The discipline emerged from Black struggle.Now the College Board wants it to be taught with barely any mention of Black Lives Matter.On Wednesday, February 1st, the first day of Black History Month, the College Board released its long-awaited curriculum for a new Advanced Placement class in African American studies.

Do you believe in discussion in our schools?Or do you want the schools to discuss just what you believe?That's the big question that all Americans need to ask themselves right now.And everything really, everything hinges on the answer.Witness two recent news stories, both involving book censorship.

"Consider the Sky and the Sea," by Ayana V. Jackson, is on view at the National Museum of African Art exhibition "From the Deep: In the Wake of Drexciya with Ayana V. Jackson."(Collection of the artist/Courtesy of Mariane Ibrahim Gallery) The premise of Ayana V. Jackson's exhibition at the National Museum of African Art is horrific yet hopeful.

Some people suspect that Donald Trump's "Make America Great Again" camp is barely a step away from "Make America White Again."They found a lot of food for that thought in the MAGA world's reaction to this year's Super Bowl pregame show.The show included Sheryl Lee Ralph of "Abbott Elementary" singing James Weldon Johnson's 123-year-old hymn "Lift Every Voice and Sing," frequently called the "Black national anthem."

What's next for Gov. J.B. Pritzker depends on the outcome of Tuesday's elections.From my perch, the one-term incumbent Democrat is likely to prevail over his arch-opponent, Republican state Sen. Darren Bailey.The slugfest will soon mercifully end and relieve us of their maddeningly negative TV ads.Pritzker's political future depends on how big he wins and how battered President Joe Biden emerges from the national midterm elections.

As he worked his way through a rice bowl at a Japanese restaurant near Columbus Circle in Manhattan on a recent afternoon, the bassist, composer and arranger Carlos Henriquez reflected on the long history of Latino musicians in the jazz world.In the 1920s, there was a bassist and tuba player called Ralph Escudero who used to play with W.C. Handy and Fletcher Henderson, he said, arching his manicured eyebrows for emphasis.

In the fall of 1947, Dizzy Gillespie called on his friend, the trumpeter-arranger Mario Bauza, in search of a conga player for an upcoming Carnegie Hall concert where he planned to debut songs exploring the connection between Afro-Cuban music and jazz.Bauza suggested Chano Pozo, a swaggering master of Yoruba rhythms, who had just arrived from Cuba.

Subscribe to our daily newsletter and have the latest stories from Mission Local delivered directly to your inbox.Angela Chung reigns over her San Francisco wig empire with an elegant flair.Her makeup is meticulous, she favors dresses over pants and on a recent Sunday, immense, globular earrings gave the impression of a woman in her fifties.

Some obsolete technologies are challenging to explain even to those of us who lived through them.In a few cases, I even relied on them, or thought that they might be the only tools through which I could process parts of the world.And then they'd vanish.When I mention them to people now, no one seems to remember.

In " Black Ball," a new book about Black players in the National Basketball Association in the nineteen-seventies, Theresa Runstedtler, a professor at American University and a former member of the Toronto Raptors dance team, lays out a compelling history of the league, and the origins of what we today call player empowerment.

The historic building in Chelsea has been sitting empty for years.Earlier this week, the Landmarks Preservation Commission voted to calendar the former Colored School No. 4 at 128 West 17th Street by Seventh Avenue in Chelsea, the last-known "colored" school in Manhattan.For the unaware, to "calendar" a location means that officials have scheduled a public hearing to discuss the significance of the site and potential plans to actually landmark it.

Under Gov. Ron DeSantis' leadership, Florida has enacted a slew of education rules that limit teaching topics including race, and sexual orientation.Octavio Jones/Getty Images Florida's Department of Education has rejected an Advanced Placement course covering African American Studies saying the class indoctrinates students to "a political agenda."

Celebrating Black History Month Nayantara Kapoor The Tiffin Girls' School (Image: The Tiffin Girls' School) Black History Month owes its roots to two passionate individuals, historian Carter G. Woodson and minister Jesse E. Moorland who in 1915, founded what was then known as the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History or the ASNLH.

Devante Smith-Pelly is back in Washington DC for the first time since leaving the Capitals after the 2018-19 season.Smith-Pelly will drop the ceremonial first puck during the team's Black History celebration against the New York Rangers at 1 pm.Smith-Pelly will always be celebrated in these parts due to his incredible and clutch performance during the 2018 Stanley Cup playoffs, which earned him the distinction of "unlikely hero" from Wayne Gretzky.

The Navy has renamed a warship in honor of a Black sailor and statesman who had been born into slavery, as part of the US military's ongoing effort to remove names that commemorate the Confederacy.The guided missile destroyer USS Chancellorsville, which was named after a Confederate victory in the Civil War, was renamed the USS Robert Smalls, the Navy announced Monday in a news release.

If you watch a political campaign ad, listen to television pundits, or look at newspaper headlines, it's clear that climate change has once again fallen off the political radar heading into this November's midterm elections.In a way, this makes sense.The Supreme Court decision eliminating a constitutional right to abortion, rampant inflation, and concerns over crime all make for more obvious political talking points.

What does U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Director Kathi Vidal think of Molly Metz's story?In a wide-ranging Clause 8 interview, that is one of the only questions Vidal chooses not to answer directly.While acknowledging that the patent system could use improvements in a variety of areas, Vidal makes it clear she prefers for the focus to be on positive stories about how the U.S. patent system is "the gold standard."

I'm probably one of the few people who hasn't seen the video footage of 29-year-old Tyre Nichols being beaten to death by five Memphis police officers.I haven't watched the video because, honestly, I am tired of seeing Black men die.It shouldn't be normal to participate in a person's last moments like this.

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a federal agency, said it was suing ExxonMobil after several nooses were discovered at the company's complex in Baton Rouge, La.The EEOC said ExxonMobil failed to take action after a Black employee discovered a noose at his work station at the chemical plant in January 2020.

Charles and Willa Bruce with Bruce's Beach (California African American Museum, Getty) Six months after Los Angeles County returned Bruce's Beach to the descendants of Black owners, the family is selling the property in Manhattan Beach back to the county for $20 million.The Bruce family, whose beachfront property was returned in July after it was seized nearly a century ago because they were Black, will sell two parcels back to the county, the Torrance Daily Breeze reported.

You'll never see Daniel Day  known as Dapper Dan among fashionistas  in sweatpants.Today, I wanted to go get coffee, can't even do that, Mr. Day said.Wherever people going to see me, I got to be dressed.That kills me, man.His interest  or calling, some might argue  in always spiffing up for the outside world goes back to his teenage years.

RALEIGH, N.C. - The North Carolina Supreme Court has struck down the legislature's most recent iteration of a photo voter ID law as an unconstitutional measure passed in part to discriminate against AfricanAmerican voters."While most people who have one of the acceptable forms of photo identification do not run the risk of being disenfranchised by this statute, the experiences of plaintiffs and other witnesses at trial showed that for themselves and others like them, the risk of disenfranchisement is very real," the opinion states.

Black History Month - Ebun Oyabayo , Townley Grammar School (Image: unsplash) The black history of Britain is by its nature a global history.Yet too often it is seen as being only the history of migration, settlement, and community formation in Britain itself.'David Olusoga, Black and British: A Forgotten History When I asked people around me what came to their mind when they thought of Black History Month, these were the responses: - A limited time to understand and acknowledge rich Black history.