Video: Goodbye, Morganza
Devon Blackwell’s short documentary explores how her great-grandparents lost the house they had owned since 1892, and the impact of that loss on generations of her family.
Langston Hughes | Beaumont to Detroit: 1943
You tell me that hitler
Is a mighty bad man.
I guess he took lessons
from the ku klux klan.
Desne A. Crossley: A Wallflower and Her Mother
Clueless about west coast Whiteness, for sure. For my anxious mother, this meant I needed her singular brand of watchful encouragement to grow into a whole person, a whole woman—and to be taught some street smarts for life in suburban Palo Alto with its unfamiliar patterns and pitfalls.
Jessie Redmon Fauset: Nostalgia
Lonely log cabin
On the road to Notasulga,
Sighing and sagging and quaking;
Let me breathe to the heart of your walls
A secret—
Terry Blackhawk: A Springfield Ghazal
My grandfather “witnessed a lynching” my father recalled,
but “expressed no shame” about what he’d seen in Springfield.
“Only a boy,” my mother maintained, when my father
began to tell about his father that night in Springfield.
Jean Toomer: Harvest Song
My ears are caked with dust of oat-fields at harvest-time.
Elizabeth Gargano: How Parables Teach Us Who We Are
Octavia Butler’s novel begins in what then seemed a distant future, our current year of 2024. Lauren Olamina, the novel’s protagonist, leads a ragged band of followers through an America that is coming apart at the seams.
Desne A. Crossley: O Rosie Girl
it was one thing for a white man to bed a black woman, but unthinkable that he would marry her. And it was commonplace for a black woman to be forced to open her legs to her employer or his sons. But Martha married white and returned home with the man!
Jean Toomer: Beehive
Earth is a waxen cell of the world comb,
And I, a drone,
Lying on my back,
Lipping honey
Helene Johnson: Invocation
Let me be buried in the rainIn a deep, dripping wood,Under the warm wet breast of EarthWhere once a gnarled tree stood.And paint a picture on my tombWith dirt and … Continue reading
David Kirby: Golden Gate by Clarence Major (Review)
A new world is rising, and for the most part these stories read like field reports about earthlings to an alien race.
Claude McKay: Harlem Shadows
Ah, little dark girls who in slippered feet
Go prowling through the night from street to street!
Brett Wilkins: 6 Mississippi ‘Goon Squad’ Deputies Plead Guilty to Torturing Black Men
Anyone surprised by this, at this point, can only be a willful denier of what Black people have said—and continue to say—about the broken culture of policing in America.
Norell Edwards: Seeking Safety as a Black Woman in New Cities
Certainly, policing cannot be the solution for the safety of Black women, who must navigate the line between white supremacist violence and its toxic violent byproducts that overwhelm the Black community.
