Sublime

In many American cities, strategically charted twentieth-century highways represented “urban renewal” for white-collar commuters but meant, in James Baldwin’s words, “Negro removal” for established Black neighborhoods suddenly isolated from goods and services. To small towns, meanwhile, highways have been what railroads were during the nineteenth c

The Clotilda’s group of Africans lived on the margins of Mobile life during the first half of the 1860s. After the war ended, however, and they found they could not get back across the ocean to Benin, the Africans founded their own colony, Africatown, in a clearing in the middle of a pine forest just north of Mobile. Cudjo Lewis was one of the surv

With her came a huge cargo: a container of her furniture, the full Husserl library in sixty boxes, her husband’s ashes in an urn, and a portrait of him, which Franz Brentano and his wife Ida von Lieben had jointly painted as an engagement present before the Husserls’ marriage.

Rosa Parks was first an organizer for the NAACP who investigated the sexual assaults of Black women by White men. Rape was a ritual of racial terror wielded against the spirits of Black women. Accusations of rape were a tool of racial terror threatening Black men. What remains harder to address is the way sexual violence exists inside Black communi

Look anywhere where there is a preponderance of Black achievement, and graduates of Morehouse and Spelman are disproportionately represented in that number. Unsurprisingly, those campuses that produce the Black leadership class in this country are also sites of the growing pains of Black America, places where sexuality, gender, and class are played

That didn’t mean they’d be welcome, especially during the Hard Times with so many folks out of work who needed somebody to be faring worse than them.

But for Black people and for Latinos, who tend to live in cities and who together comprise the majority of the imprisoned, the logic of the situation is clear. Their imprisoned bodies are converted into someone else’s right to elect people who build more prisons.

onerous

The concentration of political and economic power among high-status, politically conservative, and white-skinned Cuban Americans and others of Latin American origin was a factor in what transpired. These were the days of an intense national backlash against the civil rights movement. But it was also in the midst of Cold War politics. The US gave pr