Too often our schools gloss over the intricacies and struggles of Black liberation — This piece is part of The Uprising Marches On, a package on what’s next for the movement for Black lives. If LaGarrett King were to write a high-school U.S. history textbook, he’d create a unit on Black Lives Matter. It would start with the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012…

Dorothy Brown’s outspokenness made enemies in Tennessee’s government. But it also changed lives. — Dead-of-the-night emergency phone calls were nothing new for the Nashville, Tennessee household of surgeon Dorothy Brown. But her daughter, Lola, remembers one particular woman who showed up at their home, which also housed her mother’s medical office, sometime between two and three in the morning. “‘Who is it?’ [A shaky…

History broke wide open — and so did the arguments about what should be memorialized — This piece is part of the The Whiplash Decade, a package on the wild ride that was the 2010s. On December 10, artist Kehinde Wiley’s Rumors of War will be unveiled at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond. The bronze sculpture will reside permanently on Arthur Ashe Boulevard…

Greensboro didn’t have a “shootout” and Tulsa didn’t have a “race riot.” But it took decades of work for language to catch up to history. — On November 3, 1979, I learned of a group called the Ku Klux Klan. I was a five-year-old black child in kindergarten. I kept my days busy by making mud pies, cutting alphabet letters from construction paper, and practicing my writing with thick, footlong starter pencils. I remember surveying the…

This 2019 festival fave shines a light on race in modern-day America — Southern swingsets bear strange fruit. On August 29, 2014, 17-year-old high schooler Lennon Lacy was found dead and hanging from playground equipment near his home in Bladenboro, North Carolina. His death was ruled a suicide, despite evidence that generated more questions than watertight conclusions. …