Two education researchers say one of the most widely used terms in school reform debates should be retired because of its potential to do more harm than good.
Millicent Brown, left, was one of the first two Black students to integrate a South Carolina public school, in September 1963.
AP Photo
Short-term disputes are really symptoms of deeper divisions in the US over who deserves academic opportunity, and how to present the nation’s history.
Voting rights activists protest voter restriction laws being passed in states across the country, in Washington, D.C., July 15, 2021.
Alex Wong/Getty Images
Americans tend to think of diversity in demographic terms, but it has a qualitative element to it that reflects a fundamental battle between segregation and integration.
Black heavyweight champion Jack Johnson, right, beat James Jeffries in 1910, sparking racial violence.
George Haley, San Francisco Call, via University of California, Riverside, via Library of Congress
Johnson’s victory, in the manliest of sports, contradicted claims of racial supremacy by whites and demonstrated that Blacks were no longer willing to acquiesce to white dominance.
One criticism of traditional mentoring is that it teaches people how to succeed by playing by existing rules, thus reinforcing the status quo. But mentoring can also be a force for change.
Efforts to build wealth for Black Americans could focus on property ownership.
Matt McClain/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Some calls to resolve racial inequities in the US have raised an idea with roots more than a century old: community land trusts to assemble property for the benefit of Black Americans.
When the shuttered economy reopens, how many black Americans will be left out in the cold?
http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Virus-Outbreak-Unemployment-Funds/390acd85a7b94a2a8cfddfdd414dacfa/1/0Mark Lennihan
Black Americans were left especially vulnerable to the economic impact of COVID-19 and history shows it will take them longer to rebound.
Jean Marcellis Destine, dressed as Haitian independence hero Jean-Jacques Dessalines, heads to a protest against President Jovenel Moïse in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Oct. 4, 2019.
AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell
Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who freed Haiti from French colonial rule in 1804, is revered as a spirit in the Haitian religion. Now he’s become an icon of the uprising against President Jovanel Moïse.
Visitors and performers at Brazil’s ‘Confederate Party,’ held each April in São Paulo state.
Jordan Brasher
The Confederate flag debate has arrived to Brazil, pitting black activists against the Brazilian descendants of soldiers who fled the South after the Civil War.
Cubans attend a public discussion to revamp the country’s Cold War-era constitution in Havana, in August 2018.
Reuters/Tomas Bravo
Cuba will not legalize same-sex marriage, as gay activists hoped. But its new constitution adds greater protections for LGBTQ people and for women, and gives Cubans the right to own private property.
The success of the women’s movement shows the importance of international solidarity.
The Australian Olympic Committee posthumously awarded sprinter Peter Norman with an Order of Merit in June. His daughter Janita accepted the award on his behalf.
David Crosling/AAP
Tim Liao, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Sprinter Peter Norman has been memorialised in many ways in the US for his support of Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics. In Australia, it’s taken much longer.
A statue in Port-au-Pirnce honors Jean-Jacques Dessalines’ legacy as a Haitian revolutionary. Now, a renamed Brooklyn street does, too.
AP Photo/Dieu Nalio Chery
A renamed Brooklyn street celebrates Jean-Jacques Dessalines, a Haitian slave turned president. For centuries his legacy was tarnished by allegations that Haiti’s revolution led to ‘white genocide.’
How much has really improved for black people in the U.S. since 1968?
Ted Eytan
A minority politics scholar assesses black progress 52 years after MLK’s death based on poverty, jobs and wealth. ‘In some ways,’ she concludes, ‘we’ve barely budged as a people.’