This article originally appeared in the Huffington Post. By Paige DeLoach When I visited home for the first time after the 2016 election, my mother spoke to me in a voice I had never heard her use before. Her heart was heavy, she said. Her heart was like stone. She stammered through the conversation, quietly […]
This article originally appeared on MLK50. On Sunday, organizers will gather at Tom Lee Park to mark the anniversary of the July 10, 2016 protest that shut down the Hernando-Desoto bridge over the Mississippi River. From 4 p.m. to 10 p.m., the Coalition of Concerned Citizens will honor “the heroines and heroes who shut down […]
This article originally appeared on MLK50. MEMPHIS — July 10 marks the anniversary of the largest spontaneous act of civil disobedience in the city’s modern history. The spark: The police killings of two black men in less than 24 hours, Alton Sterling on July 5 in Louisiana and Philando Castile on July 6 in Minnesota. The kindling, though, was the generations-old […]
This article originally appeared on MLK50. On Thursday, the city of Memphis announced it would pay what can only be described as reparations for decades of shorting the retirement funds of black sanitation workers. At a press conference at the National Civil Rights Museum, Mayor Jim Strickland — the city’s first white mayor in more than 20 […]
This article first appeared on The Progressive. The June 21 shooting of a black police officer in St. Louis County by another officer has been described as “friendly fire.” That’s a laughably absurd euphemism for this latest racial incident. A 38-year-old off-duty officer, with eleven years on the force, heard a commotion in his north St. Louis […]
Originally published by Neiman Reports. The signs that someone like Donald Trump was coming were right there, in online comments lousy with creatively spelled racial slurs that slipped past even the best filters. They were in the vicious tweets and voicemail nasty grams aimed at journalists of color, especially when we wrote about race. It […]
Originally published by The Undefeated. Did a Saturday Night Live sketch last week hint at a future hard to envision in today’s bitter political climate — a future in which black and white people join forces against a broken government? That’s what Colleen Wessel-McCoy hopes. She and hundreds of others are working to organize a […]
Originally published on the Huffington Post. A heroin needle. Photo credits to Wheeler Cowperthwaite via Flickr Creative Commons. Even when it comes to drug addiction, black lives matter less. Consider the current opiate epidemic, where the overprescribing of Vicodin and Oxycontin has corrupted minds, crippled bodies and shook politicians to reconsider long-held beliefs about substance […]
Photo credits to Dorret. Originally published in TalkPoverty. About 13 years ago, I lived in Charleston, South Carolina, where I was trying to make ends meet as a freelance writer. The going was tough. I moved to the Eastside where the rents were lower, and the paint was peeling off the old manor-style houses. Soon, […]
Originally published by the Indianapolis Star. The wispy-haired 4-month-old Mark is held timeless in a frame in front of me. The 12-year-old, shaggy-haired Mark is fast asleep in the room right above my makeshift office. I used to read Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “Little Brown Baby” to him, as my mother read to my brothers and […]