By Tia Lowe It was just a few days after George Floyd died under a policeman’s knee on a Minneapolis street, a killing that would breathe greater life into protests against racial injustice as part of the Black Lives Matter movement, that Aurora James posed her question. “What if major retailers like Walmart, Sephora, Target…
By Ravyn Hardwick George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, was seen by millions in video footage gasping, “I can’t breathe” while a white police officer kneeled on his neck until he died. In death, he joined a growing litany of names: Trayvon Martin, Breonna Taylor, Atatiana Jefferson, Philando Castille, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice, just…
By Jaylin Ward The woman who said a doctor at an immigrant detention center removed one of her fallopian tubes without her consent doesn’t quite fit the Trump administration’s suggested image of a desperate illegal alien sneaking across the border from Mexico. She is 30 years old, has a 12-year-old American-born daughter, and has lived in…
By Jaylen Williams Calls to defund the police after the death of George Floyd got a lot of attention in the 2020 election season, with each presidential candidate accusing the other of seeking to slash the budget for law enforcement. But what does the call to “defund” even mean and does either outgoing President Trump…
By Kayla-Ajanae Archer-Buckley Social media has become a key component of activism in the last few years. Movements are easily able to gain traction with the use of hashtags. Popular platforms like Twitter also make it easier to spread information through infographics, circulate crowdfunding pages and share other resources. On its 10-year anniversary in 2016,…
By Jeresa Anderson The Montgomery Bus Boycott started Dec. 5, 1955, after the arrest of Rosa Parks due to her refusal to move from her seat on a bus. The boycott is seen as the first large-scale demonstration against segregation in the U.S. Since then, boycotts have become a popular tactic for protesters fighting for…
By Énoa Gibson A federal judge has ruled that the Trump administration cannot prevent Central American migrants from requesting asylum at the southwestern border of the United States, a limited victory for the Washington area’s Latino communities. The administration last year began requiring persons fleeing poverty and persecution, mostly in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala,…
By Arthur Cribbs Victorious plaintiffs in a lawsuit to compensate Maryland’s four historically black public colleges for years of inequitable funding have criticized as “disingenuous” Gov. Larry Hogan’s claim that the state cannot afford to do so because of the financial toll of the coronavirus crisis. In March, the General Assembly authorized a 10-year, $580…
By Alexis McCowan The medical evidence is definitive on how George Floyd died: asphyxiation, “the state or process of being deprived of oxygen.” And his death was a homicide, “the deliberate and unlawful killing of one person by another.” It is just as certain who killed him: prosecutors have filed murder charges against four Minneapolis…
By Greer Jackson When Trevonae Williams arrived at Howard University in Washington, D.C., last fall, she never imagined that she would see her freshman year end prematurely — let alone because of a deadly pandemic sweeping across the globe. Williams is an honors journalism student from Manchester, Jamaica, and one of the many international students…