Category: KOLUMN Magazine

Dozens of lawyers from three major firms have been hired. Thousands of volunteer attorneys and poll watchers across the country have been recruited. — Anita Kumar, Politico A year before President Donald Trump alarmed Americans with talk of disputing elections last week, his team started building a massive legal network to do just that. Dozens […]

— Juanita Giles, NPR, WAMU 88.5 There are a lot of things I miss during this pandemic. Shoot, we do so little with other people that I have a sneaking suspicion I’ve lost all my social skills. We keep our bubble pretty tight, and it’s a good thing we all like each other, because we’ve […]

— Charles Davis, Business Insider The Trump administration may have violated the US Constitution by illegally spying on protesters in Portland, four Oregon lawmakers charged in a letter to Chad Wolf, acting head of the Department of Homeland Security. Earlier this week, The Nation reported that federal agents deployed by President Donald Trump may have intercepted protesters’ […]

Get ready to laugh: The comedy vet premieres ‘The Amber Ruffin Show’ on Peacock — Cori Murray, Essence When the clock strikes 9 pm EST tonight, late night talk show’s diversity will increase 100 percent thanks to Amber Ruffin. Since 2014, she’s been providing extremely funny and equally smart skits on NBC’s Late Night with Seth […]

— Erin Blakemore, The Washington Post When surgeons at the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond performed a successful heart transplant in 1968, it made news. The transplant was the 16th ever performed, and the first in the South. It was newsworthy for another reason, too: The heart had been taken from a Black factory […]

— EJI Staff, EJI, Equal Justice Initiative On September 26, 1963, the Alabama Supreme Court upheld the contempt conviction of Mary Hamilton, a Black woman who was demeaned in court by a white prosecutor. The prosecutor refused to use the word “Miss” when addressing Ms. Hamilton, and insisted on calling her by her first name, […]

— The New Yorker As a photographer, James E. Hinton made pictures of some of the most prominent figures of the civil-rights era: leaders, athletes, and artists including Martin Luther King, Jr., Stokely Carmichael, Muhammad Ali, Mahalia Jackson, and Miles Davis. Yet the majority of his images—more than forty thousand, many of which are being digitized […]

— Maria Russo, The New York Times Last week, Roald Dahl’s widow, Felicity Dahl, told the BBC that the children’s author had written an early draft of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” in which Charlie Bucket was black. Mrs. Dahl called it “a shame” that his agent persuaded her husband to make Charlie white. But […]

— Staff, Mo’better News Lauryn Hill’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill has been named one of the greatest albums of all time by Rolling Stone. Released in 1998, the breakout debut from the former Fugees frontwoman lands at No. 10 on the magazine’s prestigious list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, the highest placement for a rap […]

— Chris King and Kenya Vaughn, The St. Louis American It was not a story Wayman F. Smith III told of himself, but his sister, the former news anchor Robin Smith, tells it. Each time she tells this story, she weeps. One day her parents told her that her brother was leaving the house and […]