By Shirley Carswell The Sunday Washington Post article on Howard University Hospital, which described a once-grand institution fallen on hard times, struck close to home for me. That’s because I had an unexpected visit to Howard’s emergency room two days earlier. My medical emergency wasn’t life threatening, but the pain I was experiencing after busting…
By Beverly Lindsay-Johnson “If there were no E.B. Henderson, there may not be a Michael Jordan or LeBron James. All these people who have made a living off basketball.” — Howard University Assistant Professor Mark Beckford Who is E.B. Henderson? Edwin B. Henderson, also known as E.B., was a basketball player, a pioneer, visionary, author…
Mildred Loving, born in 1939, was a civil rights activist who successfully defeated Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage on June 12, 1967. Mildred Jeter was born and raised in Central Point, Virginia, about 90 miles south of Washington, D.C. She attended an all-black high school, and met her future husband, Richard Loving, in Central Point….
Florence Griffith Joyner is considered the best female track star ever to have competed at the Olympic level. Joyner still holds the fastest record for the 100-meter and 200-meter dash and collected three gold medals during the 1988 Summer Olympic Games in Seoul. Joyner’s record times have been difficult for other athletes to even come…
Denzel Washington’s film adaptation of August Wilson’s “Fences,” which premiers on Christmas Day, is being praised as an original remake of the Broadway play. However, this story has been an essential work in American theater for more than 30 years, and it didn’t originate with Washington. Oscar-winning actor James Earl Jones originally portrayed Troy Maxson,…
“I’m moving to Canada!” Many people who are concerned about living under Donald Trump as U.S. president have been repeating this sentence in recent weeks and months. On Election Day, the website of the Canadian immigration office broke down completely. Too many people tried to get information about the immigration process in Canada on Tuesday,…
Many people consider it common knowledge that more black men are in prison than in college. “A third more African-American men are incarcerated than in higher education,” according to Jason Ziedenberg and Vincent Schiraldi, who wrote the 2002 report from the Justice Policy Institute, “Cellblocks or Classrooms: The Funding of Higher Education and Corrections and…
In an iconic scene in the 2001 historical war movie “Pearl Harbor,” a cook fired one of the .50 caliber machine guns on the ship, shooting down four planes. The film, directed by Michael Bay, was a dramatic retelling of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor 75 years ago on Dec. 7, 1941. It was…
Alicia Keys launched a movement after she published a letter on Lena Dunham’s blog, Lenny, in May, stating that she has had enough of wearing makeup everyday. Her reason is simple: “I don’t want to cover up anymore. Not my face, not my mind, not my soul, not my thoughts, not my dreams, not my…
The Mothership is the space vehicle of George Clinton aka Mr. Funkenstein and his wingmen of Supergroovalisticprosifunkstication. As part of the Parliament-Funkadelic theory, it existed as a fictional vehicle of funk arrival to engage fans who were down with the P-Funk movement. After the success of his hit “Chocolate City,” Clinton says, the Mothership was later developed into a physical…