Willoughby Avenue - KOLUMN Magazine

Black Kids And Suicide: Why Are Rates So High, And So Ignored? | Blavity

January 24, 2020January 24, 2020African American Health, Mental Health

… Black youth at risk may even be more difficult to identify than non-Black youth. [mc4wp_form id=”6042″] Teen suicide rates among black youth are increasing. In 2016 and again in 2018, national data revealed that among children age 5-11, black children had the highest rate of death by suicide. For the years 2008 to 2012, […]

Meet the 15-Year-Old Who Went From an Ice Cream Cart to an Ice Cream Parlor | Black Enterprise

January 24, 2020January 24, 2020#BuyBlack, African American Entrepreneurs

At only 8 years old, Victor “Beau” Tracy Shell surprised his parents by asking for an ice cream cart for his birthday in order to sell ice cream not only to buy his own toys but to help his family as well. Soon, his parents obliged and he received the cart on his birthday, giving […]

First African American-owned bourbon brand to debut in Louisville | WLKY

January 24, 2020January 28, 2020#BuyBlack, African American Entrepreneurs

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (Sarah Shadburne) — Victor Yarbrough wanted to do something that would bring positive opportunities for economic growth to west Louisville, according to our partners at Louisville Business First. [mc4wp_form id=”6042″] So, he started his own bourbon brand with his brothers Chris and Bryson. It’s called Brough Brothers Bourbon, and it’s already distributed through […]

‘Cane River’: A Forgotten Black Director’s Only Film Resurfaces After Being Lost for 40 years | IndieWire

January 23, 2020January 23, 2020African American Cinema, African American Entertainment ...

Oscilloscope Laboratories has acquired the restored film for a theatrical run to begin in February. [mc4wp_form id=”6042″] Debuting in 1982, “Cane River” was an independent-film curio: a race and colorism-themed love story with an all-black cast, written and directed by a black filmmaker, financed by wealthy black backers. The filmmaker’s name was Horace B. Jenkins, […]

Future of Historic African American School in Jeopardy | U.S. News

January 23, 2020January 23, 2020KOLUMN Magazine

MOUNT PLEASANT, S.C. (AP) — It was expected to be the beginning of a joyous preservation effort: relocating the town’s last standing African American school. But blocked by fumbled permits and mired in controversy, the effort failed. [mc4wp_form id=”6042″] Plans to preserve the Long Point School have raised tensions among several residents in Snowden, a […]

“Blind Tom,” born a slave, at the age of 10 became the highest paid pianist of the 19th century | The Vintage News

January 23, 2020June 19, 2020African American Entertainment

Tijana Radeska, The Vintage News “Blind Tom” was a musical prodigy who was born in slavery in 1850, in the state of Georgia. He was a contemporary virtuoso of Liszt and Rubinstein, but one who seemed unaware of his skin color, his fame, or his success. Blind Tom was aware only of the sounds and […]

The Troubling Fate of a 1973 Film About the First Black Man in the C.I.A. (2018) | The New Yorker

January 22, 2020January 27, 2020African American Film

Ivan Dixon’s “The Spook Who Sat by the Door,” from 1973, displays the bedrock of racist attitudes and assumptions that renders racist policies both inescapable and irreparable. [mc4wp_form id=”6042″] Ivan Dixon’s 1973 film, “The Spook Who Sat by the Door,” which is playing at Metrograph from Friday through Sunday (it’s also on DVD and streaming), […]

Virginians push to remember historically black high schools | The Washington Post

January 22, 2020January 22, 2020African American Education, African American History ...

NORFOLK, Va. — Vivian Monroe-Hester’s high school textbooks harbored hatred in their margins. [mc4wp_form id=”6042″] As a teenager at the all-black Booker T. Washington High School in segregated, 1960s-era Virginia, Monroe-Hester studied from used books passed along by white high schools. White students, knowing the texts’ final destination, scrawled their animus atop pictures, beneath paragraphs, […]

Remembering the 1968 Orangeburg Massacre When Police Shot Dead Three Unarmed Black Students | Democracy Now

January 21, 2020January 21, 2020African American History, Racism

The 1968 Orangeburg massacre is one of the most violent and least remembered events of the civil rights movement. [mc4wp_form id=”6042″] A crowd of students gathered on the campus of South Carolina State University to protest segregation at Orangeburg’s only bowling alley. After days of escalating tensions, students started a bonfire and held a vigil […]

Op-Ed: California’s forgotten slave history | Los Angeles Times

January 21, 2020African American History, Black History

Separated by just 60 miles along the I-10, Los Angeles and San Bernardino feel worlds apart. [mc4wp_form id=”6042″] The former boasts some of the richest urban developments and residential pockets in the nation. The latter — a “broken city,” as this newspaper put it in 2015 — struggled through five years of bankruptcy and municipal […]