Breaking News
Upcoming Film Festivals Featuring Black Filmmakers’ Movies
Below are the dates and sites of upcoming film festivals around the country and samples of the movies by and about African Americans that you can expect to see there: Service To Man won the American Black Film Festival’s Grand Jury Prize in Miami in June 2016. It will screen this weekend in both the…
Read MoreOur Museum’s Response to Milwaukee’s Recent Unrest
Because America’s Black Holocaust Museum (ABHM) is based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, visitors to ABHM online have inquired about our response to the recent unrest in a predominantly black neighborhood in our city. Though not immediately apparent on the ABHM website, our museum’s principal spokesperson has been helping local, national, and international press explain these events…
Read MoreEfforts by Counties and Towns to Purge Minority Voters From Rolls
Sparta, Georgia, is purging its voter rolls of African Americans. Before the 1965 Voting Rights Act was gutted by the Supreme Court, this is precisely the sort of electoral maneuver that once would have needed Justice Department approval before it could be put in effect. And this is but one of many places in the USA where such seemingly small but effective efforts at voter suppression are taking place ahead of November’s presidential election.
Read MoreFederal Court Strikes Down NC Voter ID Requirement
A federal appeals court decisively struck down North Carolina’s voter identification law on Friday, saying its provisions deliberately “target African-Americans with almost surgical precision” in an effort to depress black turnout at the polls. Much of Wisconsin’s voter identification law was also struck down.
Read MoreWhite allies show solidarity with Black Lives Matter
In the wake of the recent police killings of two black men, Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, public opinion, particularly among white people, has started to shift. Forty new chapters of a national network of groups and individuals organizing white people for racial justice –– Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) –– have formed in the weeks since the incidents.
Read MoreIt’s Time to Ring the Alarm About White Nationalism
The media reports on Islamic terrorism and individual ambushes of police, but it has largely overlooked increasingly brazen demonstrations and violence by the Far Right, treating each as a separate unconnected episode. But are they? In the last year, the level of violence has ramped up dramatically.
Read More212 Slaves Died on the São José Ship; National Museum Shares Their Story
The first items recovered from the sunken slave ship have arrived in Washington, D.C., and will be displayed at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. By Allison Keyes, theRoot.com Paul Gardullo lifted an iron ballast from a Portuguese slave ship that sank in 1794 out of a crate Wednesday morning and…
Read MoreU.S. spending on prisons grew at three times rate of school spending: report
U.S. state and local spending on prisons and jails grew at three times the rate of spending on schools over the last 33 years as the number of Americans behind bars ballooned under a spate of harsh sentencing laws
Read MoreIn the Turmoil Over Race and Policing, Children Pay a Steep Emotional Price
By YAMICHE ALCINDOR, New York Times In the past week alone, there was the 4-year-old girl in Falcon Heights, Minn., who was captured on video consoling her mother after they watched a police officer shoot the mother’s boyfriend through the window of a car. And there was the 15-year-old boy in Baton Rouge, La., who sobbed uncontrollably in…
Read MoreStudy Supports Suspicion That Police Are More Likely to Use Force on Blacks
A new study has found that the race of the person being stopped by police officers is significant in terms of how much force is used. The study of thousands of use-of-force episodes from police departments across the nation has concluded what many people have long thought, but which could not be proved because of a lack of data: African-Americans are far more likely than whites and other groups to be the victims of use of force by the police, even when racial disparities in crime are taken into account.
Read More