Entries from March 2008

March 31, 2008

THE YEAR OF SUNDAY

We all live in the Year of Sunday, so many things are in store for us.
Oh what a gift to be born in Sunday’s beautiful light way down here in the dusk.
People, return to the tree of oneness, oh won’t you hurry the Presence is there.
Down on our knees in the darkness of Sunday, we’ll [...]

March 31, 2008

FROM THE ARCHIVES: BALTIMORE POLICE DEPARTMENT BANS TWISTS, LOCKS

C WBAL-TV
6:08 p.m. EST December 5, 2006
BALTIMORE – The WBAL TV 11 News I-Team has obtained a new professional appearance policy for the Baltimore Police Department intended to promote a professional image, but it’s also raising questions of racial insensitivity. The new policy is more specific than the old one. For example, tattoos must now be [...]

March 31, 2008

THE PERILOUS POLITICS OF HAIR

By Grace Salvant | TheRoot.com

March 25, 2008 — How my box braids kept me out of a waitressing job in a rapidly gentrifying America. Also on TheRoot.com, another writer explains why he decided, after 13 years, to cut off his locks.

March 25, 2008 — A strange and sad thing happened to me on my job search this year. I [...]

March 31, 2008

LEST WE FORGET: AN OPEN LETTER TO MY SISTERS WHO ARE BRAVE

By Alice Walker | TheRoot.com

The author argues that we must build alliances not on ethnicity or gender, but on truth.

March 27, 2008I HAVE COME home from a long stay in Mexico to find – because of the presidential campaign, and especially because of the Obama/Clinton race for the Democratic nomination – a new country existing alongside [...]

March 30, 2008

LIES AND CONSEQUENCES

By Helena Andrews | TheRoot.com

Everybody wants to be a gangsta.

March 11, 2008–Call it a comedy of editors. Looking back on the initial media blitz surrounding Love and Consequences, the auto-myth-ography by Margaret B. Jones (nee Margaret “Peggy” Seltzer), laughs come first, but anger comes hardest.
Take last week’s 2,000-word New York Times profile about the author and [...]

March 30, 2008

IN REMEMBRANCE, 3-30-2008

DITH PRAN, ‘KILLING FIELDS’ PHOTOGRAPHER 

By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Published: March 31, 2008
Dith Pran, a photojournalist for The New York Times whose gruesome ordeal in the killing fields of Cambodia was re-created in a 1984 movie that gave him an eminence he tenaciously used to press for his people’s rights, died on Sunday at a hospital in New [...]

March 30, 2008

OBAMA LEADS IN TEXAS CAUCUS TALLY

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: March 30, 2008
Filed at 11:53 p.m. ET
AUSTIN (AP) — The contest between Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton for Texas delegates appeared to be tightening, as counting from Saturday’s caucuses dragged on into Sunday.
Obama led Clinton 58 percent-42 percent in results that had been reported through Sunday night, but nearly half [...]

March 30, 2008

A DIFFERENT KIND OF STUDENT EXAM

By FRAN SILVERMAN
Published: March 30, 2008
JIM HENNESSY, a Darien High School junior, does not go to school dances anymore. The 16-year-old is boycotting them because to get in, he has to take a test that he thinks is unfair: Before he and classmates are allowed to enter a dance, they are asked to breathe into [...]

March 30, 2008

ORIGINS: JACKIE ORMES AND THE WORLD OF COMICS AND BLACK DOLLS

Jackie Ormes. 
From the collection of Judie Miles
 

By DOUGLAS WOLK
Published: March 30, 2008
Jackie Ormes, nee Zelda Mavin Jackson, was a journalist, artist, socialite and progressive political activist, a well-known figure in Chicago’s black community in the ’50s and ’60s. She was also, as the subtitle of Nancy Goldstein’s biography indicates, the first African-American woman to write [...]

March 30, 2008

BEFORE A GAME, CLEAR MEMORIES OF DARKER DAYS

By GEORGE VECSEY
Published: March 24, 2008
Birmingham, Ala.

Rogelio V. Solis/Associated Press
Oklahoma Coach Jeff Capel paid homage to black coaches who came before him.

    

Jim Wilson/The New York Times
A plaque in Birmingham, Ala., marks a bombing in 1963.

Just a few blocks from the basketball arena, in the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, is a copy of the city’s ordinances [...]