In the 1930s, there was a shortage (read: a total absence) of track teams for black women in Albany, Alabama. So Alice Coachman, the first woman to win a gold medal in the Summer Olympics (1948), spent her childhood dreaming up clever ways to begin training to become a record-breaking high jumper. Continue reading
The 1980s was a huge decade for black women. Angela Davis made her first Vice Presidential run in 1980. In 1982, Alice Walker was the first black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for The Color Purple. Toni Morrison doubled down on the ass kicking when she won the Nobel Prize for literature later that year. On the opposite, but no less notable end of the achievement spectrum, Vanessa Williams was the first black woman to win the Miss America pageant, in 1984, and the first black woman to turn a public nudity and over-blown, puritanical rage incident into a hit record and successful acting career. Ah! The infancy of equality!
Returning to sports, one of the most notable people of this decade was groundbreaking, world champion, figure skater Debi Thomas. Continue reading
Well, football season may be over but don’t be blue! The games go must on! Welcome to Black History Month: Athlete Week! Let’s kick it off with someone who could give Samuel L. Jackson AP BAMF lessons. Continue reading
Anna Julia Cooper (1858-1964), was born a slave in Raleigh, North Carolina. In 1868 she began an pursuing an education that took her from Raleigh, to Oberlin, to Washington D.C, eventually earning a Ph.D from the University of Paris in 1925. She was the fourth American black woman to do so. Continue reading
It’s the first second of February! There is a chill in the air! Candy hearts are on sale! PBS is showing In Performance at the White House: A Musical Celebration of the Civil Rights Movement! So, throw on a black turtleneck, dust off your DVD set of Eyes on the Prize and let’s get this twenty-eight day party started!
First, read this fairly tone deaf article on gentrification in Harlem and Bed Stuy from the New York Times on the August 4, 2011.
Then read this elegant evisceration of the idea that gentrification “just happens” or is somehow the fault of the minorities who get forced out of their neighborhoods.
To really understand the harm perpetrated by gentrification you have to know your history. Continue reading
Good evening everyone, I’m really glad you’re here.
Welcome to the Crasstalk Book Club discussion of Isabel Wilkerson’s book, The Warmth of Other Suns.
In the great tradition of Crasstalk Book Club selections this was not exactly an uplifting book. It’s oppression and degradation with the occasional “They made it!” moment. So, pretty much your typical immigrant story.
But these people weren’t immigrants. They were Americans, many with ties to this country older than the white people who shit on them for sport. The people of the Great Migration put up with the worst the United States had to offer and still kept hoping and striving for better. The thought that kept running through my head on the second reading was something right out of Ida Mae Brandon Gladney’s favorite book, Matthew 5:5 “Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.”
Ok, Jesus, sure. But WHEN exactly will that be? Continue reading
This Photo Phriday is dedicated to everyone in a part of the world where it has been a bit on the warm side lately. Tonight we celebrate the quintissential summer wardrobe staple: the t-shirt.
But I’m not interested in just any old t-shirt. It’s time to show us your FAVORITE t-shirt. Continue reading
It’s not a secret that curly hair can be difficult to manage. Curly hair will never look the same fantastic way twice, but it will gladly and repetitively mold itself into an homage to the Bride of Frankenstein, on the Friday of your important interview and the Saturday of your wedding.
Terrific.
Last night at roughly 11:oopm EST, President Obama announced that the United States was in custody of the body of Osama Bin Laden, the founder of al- Qaida and the leader behind the 9/11 attacks that killed over 3000 Americans in 2001.