Category: KOLUMN Magazine

By Danielle Dorsey, Travel Noire Often forgotten in our retelling of American history is the Reconstruction Era after the Civil War, when recently emancipated Black people experienced an albeit brief period of hope. It was during this time that efforts were made to address the scars of slavery and help integrate the formerly seceded Southern […]

Eliza Orlins is a public defender and Democratic candidate for Manhattan district attorney. That viral video circulating of a white woman calling the police on a black man in New York’s Central Park on Monday was sadly all too familiar. The privilege that the woman in the video sought to weaponize with her 911 call is real […]

By EJI Staff, EJI, Equal Justice InitiativeEqual Justice Initiative, “Lynching in America: Targeting Black Veterans” (2017) Americans appropriately celebrate the valor, bravery, and courage of the men and women who have fought and risked their lives for this country. But the history of racial terrorism and violence endured by thousands of African American veterans remains […]

Oakland’s Marcus Books has remained a space for ‘black living and thinking’ through gentrification and online competition. Now it’s turning to readers for help Since 1975, Oakland’s Marcus Books has survived one of the most dramatic gentrifications in US history, aggressive competition from online stores, and the inevitable racism directed at a space that celebrates […]

Lillian Fishburne is one of the many pioneering black servicemen and women who have made positive contributions to the nation’s armed forces while serving. In 1998, she became the first African-American woman to hold the rank of Rear Admiral in the United States Navy. Fishburne is “a woman whose story helps us to understand the truth […]

Jemele Hill, an award-winning journalist who has been outspoken about President Trump and Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, said on a podcast released Wednesday that she did not regret calling Trump a “white supremacist” in September 2017. “I thought I was saying water is wet,” Hill said on Dan Le Batard’s “South Beach Sessions” podcast. “I […]

For over 50 years, the photographer Kwame Brathwaite captured African-American beauty and fashion, giving visual power to black power. – Untitled (Photo shoot at a school for one of the many modeling groups who had begun to embrace natural hairstyles in the 1960s), 1966. Credit…Kwame Brathwaite/Courtesy of Philip Martin Gallery, Los Angeles – – Untitled […]

UPHOLDING THE LEGACY OF FAMOUS BLACK COWBOYS LIKE BILL PICKETT, THIS OKMULGEE RODEO SHOWS THAT SKILL KNOWS NO BOUNDARIES. America’s oldest black rodeo, the Okmulgee Roy LeBlanc Invitational Rodeo has been a local tradition since Roy LeBlanc and his father Charles started it in 1955. These days, more than 1,500 people gather every August to […]