By The Editors
Eunice Johnson, who created the Ebony Fashion Fair in the mid-1950s and built it into a powerful social and financial success, was clairvoyant.

By The Editors
Eunice Johnson, who created the Ebony Fashion Fair in the mid-1950s and built it into a powerful social and financial success, was clairvoyant.

By Janet Singleton
Black-themed works and those featuring African-American actors in the lead comment intentionally and unintentionally about the state of race relations for their time. By Barack Obama’s 2008 election, 2009’s crop of releases had been conceived and made. Yet certain ones incidentally whisper a sense of a new dawn; others are more products of the past. Here we will spotlight the historical celluloid backdrop of a swath of last year’s landscape of releases.

By Lee A. Daniels
‘Tis the season for me to once again defend one of my fictional heroes—Ebenezer Scrooge, the central character of Charles Dickens’ classic morality tale, A Christmas Carol.

By Ralph Richardson
I am an NYC-based filmmaker, so I come to this Top 25 list with a wonderful joy and love for film, and since my mother took me to the movies every week since I was 3, I also have a pretty good knowledge of this grand art form

By Stacey Patton
Ugandans don’t like homosexuals.

That simple phrase is a gross understatement to the country’s 500,000 gays and lesbians living in the heavily Muslim and Christian nation of 30 million, where 95% of the population opposes legalizing homosexual acts. The Ugandan parliament is trying to further crack down on the lives of gays and lesbians as it debates a draconian Anti-Homosexuality Bill that would require its citizens to peep behind bedroom doors and tell on people who engage in “unnatural” consensual sex.

By Lee A. Daniels
Now that millions of white Americans are out of work, enduring the sense of desperation that poverty and joblessness bring, I can’t believe I’m not hearing the faux-moralists lecture them about taking “personal responsibility” for their own circumstances.

By Lee A. Daniels
They were criminals, all 400-plus of them, according to the duly enacted laws of the states of the Old Confederacy – lawbreakers, ‘race mixers,’ and disturbers of the peace.  Government officials and editorialists across the South called them “communists,” “socialists,” and “outside agitators.” They were beaten, with the connivance of the police, by Ku Klux Klan thugs in Alabama. They were jailed in Mississippi, first in the city jail in Jackson, and then, in the notorious Parchman state penitentiary. Their very lives were in danger.

They were the Freedom Riders.

By Lee A. Daniels
The Obama Presidency is less than a year old, but by now many of us are accustomed to the perverse, racist notions that have oozed from the moldering, pathological psyches of some Americans since the majority of voters elected Barack Obama president. Nonetheless, as in the days of blacks’ struggle for basic civil rights, something new always occurs to remind us of racism’s ugly imaginative resiliency.

By TaRessa Stovall
Another hip-hop artist is headed to jail, seemingly determined to live out the drama of his own lyrics.

Grammy Award-winning superstar Lil Wayne, real name Dwayne Carter, pleaded guilty on October 15 to a felony charge of attempted criminal possession of a weapon in New York City.