by Dr. Boyce Watkins When you think about leading HBCUs like Spelma, Morehouse, FAMU and Howard, do you put them in the same category as Harvard, Yale, Stanford and Princeton? Many black people, unfortunately, have been trained to believe that the institutions that educate black students are inferior to those that have mainstream acceptance and visibility. I’m here to tell you that this is a huge mistake. The educational investment…
Daily Archives :
July 19, 2014
A Florida man who was convicted of second degree mυrder is now dedicating time to preventing other teens from walking down the same path. Darrell Turner is only 22, but he’s already served time in prison for second degree mυrder. Turner, who lives in Jacksonville, Florida, served two years in jail stemming from a crime he participated in when he was only 16. “I don’t want to see them up…
They say necessity is the mother of invention, so in the 20th century when some blacks wanted to confuse and confound white racists, they got creative with their approach. Blacks during the 20th century needed to pass, not because they wanted to be white, but for survival’s sake. The problem is that most blacks can’t possibly pass for white. Many can, however, pass for Indian, and that’s exactly what some…
Muhammad Ali wasn’t called “The Greatest” just because of what he could do in the ring. He was also an extraordinary speaker and thinker in his own right. He never went to college, but would debate anyone, anywhere without any fear. This video is rare footage of Ali speaking on a white college campus with a student who is confronting him about his decision not to fight in the Vietnam…
As of late, it seems that when people on the far right are all out of talking points, they just inject the civil rights movement into the conversation. Not long ago, former Republican governor Mike Huckabee said Martin Luther King Jr. would agree that gay marriage is sort of like the Holocaust. Now the Open Carry Texas group, which has become notorious for carrying guns and rifles into public spaces,…
When you travel across the U.S., you’re likely to see monuments of the Founding Fathers, and even Martin Luther King Jr., as The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf noted, but it isn’t likely that you’ll see a statue of people who don’t represent achievements. Given that America has both its achievements and failures, Friedersdorf wonders if it would be wise to have more statues like the one in Birmingham, Alabama depicting police…