By Stacey Patton
In her new book, Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How There is a Better Way for Africa, the Harvard and Oxford-educated Zambian native argues that wealthy western countries providing billions of dollars in aid to the continent have failed to feed and teach Africans how to cast their own nets so they can be self-sufficient.

By Esther Armah
We know Ike and Tina’s story. We’re still learning Chris and Rihanna’s. And that of every other black girl who knows Rihanna’s bruises intimately, who has stared in the mirror at unrecognizable features.

By Asha Bandele
As the drama between music superstars Chris Brown and Rihanna unfolds in the headlines, I remember the year 2006 and some boy-on-girl violence that hit uncomfortably close to home.

By Lee A. Daniels
This week Major League Baseball is celebrating one of its most transcendent moments and its most transcendent player, Jack Roosevelt Robinson, better known as Jackie Robinson.

By TaRessa Stovall
Julio Santiago spent his working life as a U.S. Merchant Marine, providing naval or military auxiliary support in times of war or national emergency. Now retired, Julio lives in Santurce, Puerto Rico on a pension of $6,400 per year. At 84, he suffers from the early stages of dementia and prostrate cancer.

By Deborah Rudacille
At the colossal Sparrows Point steelworks on the outer shores of Baltimore harbor, founded in 1887, black men long fed the sweltering ovens and furnaces while white men ran the finishing mills that produced gleaming coils of steel, tin, nails, wire and pipe. Three generations of my father’s family labored on Sparrows Point and I grew up in a nearby white working class community that owed much of its post-war prosperity to Bethlehem Steel.

By TaRessa Stovall
Newsflash: Racial pride and strong ethnic features may be hazardous to equality.
A recent study said that “whites react more negatively to racial minority individuals who strongly identify with their racial group than to racial minority individuals who weakly identify with their group.”

By Imani Perry
Staceyann Chin’s memoir, The Other Side of Paradise is a kuntsleroman, the coming-of-age story of an artist. It begins with her early childhood. Staceyann and her older brother are being reared by their efficiently loving and spiritually devout grandmother, two small poor children in rural Jamaica. By memoir’s end she has attended the most elite University in the Caribbean, found her actor’s voice through a theatrical production of Barbadian poet Kamau Braithwaite’s The Arrivants, and is departing for New York City.

By Nicholas Lemann
“On Easter Sunday, when the Christian world was chanting anthems in commemoration of the resurrection of the world’s Redeemer, when from every sanctuary the gospel of love and peace was proclaimed, it was then that angels veiled their faces, and devils howled at the bloody and revolting scenes that were enacted on the banks of the Red River.”

Alice Walker receives The Pulitzer Prize in fiction for her novel The Color Purple.