In a compelling history of the strike of sanitation workers that brought Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to Memphis in 1968, Ted Conover connects the concerns of Memphis fifty years ago with present-day, national movements around labor and income inequality.
Danielle Jackson
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Teens Trapped Between a Gang and the Law
More than 200,000 children from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras came to the U.S. unaccompanied between 2014 and 2016. Allowed to enter the country while awaiting deportation proceedings or asylum decisions, many settled with relatives in parts of Suffolk County, Long Island. For The New Yorker, Jonathan Blitzer writes of the precarious course the children must […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
How Hospitals Are Failing Black Mothers
In the latest entry of ProPublica’s Lost Mothers series, which looks at maternal care in the U.S., Annie Waldman examines how black mothers who deliver at hospitals that disproportionately serve black patients are more likely to suffer serious complications.
Posted inEditor's Pick
On Basquiat, the Black Body, and a Strange Sensation in My Neck
Aisha Sabatini Sloan weaves together recollections of her own neck injuries and back pain with a study of visual artist Jean-Michel Basquiat’s diligent, abstract renderings of body parts and bones.
Posted inArts & Culture, Quotes, Science & Nature
Black Women’s Maternal Mortality Rates in the US are Staggeringly High
Shalon Irving was educated, insured, and well-supported by family and friends. She still became a casualty of missed opportunities and neglect by healthcare providers.
Posted inArts & Culture, Covers
Jay-Z Opens Up About Race in America, Therapy, and ‘4:44’
The hip-hop artist sits down for a wide-ranging interview with NYT executive editor Dean Baquet.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Nothing Protects Black Women From Dying in Pregnancy and Childbirth
Journalists Nina Martin and Renee Montagne tell the story of Shalon Irving, an epidemiologist for CDC who got pregnant at 36 and collapsed three weeks after the birth of her child, to confront the disproportionately high rates of maternal mortality among black women in the United States.
Posted inArts & Culture, Essays & Criticism, Quotes, Unapologetic Women, Writing
On the Contentious Borders of the American South
Zandria F. Robinson narrates her coming of age Memphis while examining contemporary southernness.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Border Wars
When writer and scholar Zandria F. Robinson tries to understand what makes “southernness” a distinct quality in music, food, language, or attitudes about race, she realizes that borders and categories are porous.
Posted inHistory, Nonfiction, Profiles & Interviews, Quotes, Unapologetic Women
New York Radical Women and the Limits of Second Wave Feminism
The collective redefined feminism in the 1970s, but it’s blind spots still linger, especially for black women.