PA/David Parry
The Missing Thread is a careful and honest curation of black identity and displacement.
Antoinette Robertson as Lisa in The Blackening.
Glen Wilson
The Blackening excels at subverting the very stereotypes it plays upon for its humour.
A character from ‘The Boondocks’ is depicted in street art in Los Angeles during the time of the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020.
Chelsea Guglielmino via Getty Images
A sociology professor uses the popular ‘Boondocks’ cartoon to explore contemporary issues of race in American society.
A 1902 portrait of Paul Lawrence Dunbar.
Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images
Paul Laurence Dunbar became the first Black writer to earn international acclaim through his poetry, essays and musical lyrics.
Readers reports, scripts and selected photographs. From top left Garland Anderson, Una Marson and Isabel Cooley who appeared in the ethnic Players Theatre Guild productions of Anna Lucasta.
Alamy/Fair Use/Creative Commons
Theatre censorship laws stifled Black playwrights for more than 200 years – here’s what we found in the archive.
Twitter HQ, San Francisco.
Phil Pasquini
Black Twitter has played a significant role in shaping the platform. In the wake of Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover, questions are being asked over the community’s future.
#blacktwitter helped mobilize social protests against police brutality across the country, like this one in New York City in July 2020.
Ira L. Black/Corbis via Getty Images
Black Twitter is often the preferred forum for candid and authentic Black-centered discussions on police brutality. Without it, holding police accountable may become even more difficult.
English rock duo Nova Twins: Georgia South (left) and Amy Love (right).
Nova Twins Ltd
Black artists have been fundamental to the history of alternative music – the introduction of the Mobos’ alternative category mustn’t forget that.
Entertainer and author Janelle Monáe performs during the 2019 Grammys flanked by android-like backup dancers.
Kevin Winter/Getty Images
Even though Afrofuturist works are set in fictional worlds, they provide a blueprint for social, political and economic systems free from exploitation and oppression.
Sociologist Marcus Anthony Hunter found that for Black patrons of a Black nightclub, the ‘nightly round’ mitigated the impacts of spatial and social isolation.
(Unslpash/Tobias Nii Kwatei Quartey)
If bars are forced to restrict people’s movement in our post-coronavirus pandemic world, they will lose some of their most important social functions.
Warner Bros
Fifty years after the original film, three generations of Shaft are loose on the streets of New York.
Lupita Nyong'o, Evan Alex, and Shahadi Wright Joseph in Jordan Peele’s Us (2019).
Universal Pictures
Peele’s films reflect the way many African-American directors have used the horror genre to reflect the black experience.
Peter Foley/EPA
Aretha Franklin, the ‘Queen of Soul’, was the first woman to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
beyonce.
Teeming with references to African culture and experience, the couple’s latest work places ‘blackness'at the heart of the Western canon.