By Tarice L.S. Gray
While at a swim meet two weeks ago in Canada, World Record Holder and 2008 US Olympic Swimmer Cullen Jones got some heartbreaking news: Another child of color had drowned in his United States.

By Mark Lassiter
If you are stubbornly resisting the temptation to watch, or thinking about attending a viewing party with a group of total strangers who are living and dying with every goal, here are eleven tips from someone who dares you to hold your breath and say the word “goal!!!” for as long as you can hold it.

By Tarice L.S. Gray
On February 23, 2010 at the Director’s Guild of America, Academy Award-nominated actress Taraji P. Henson spoke eloquently about Bill Duke, one of the people she wanted to thank for her Oscar-worthy performance in the film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Duke, the esteemed actor/director, who acted in such films as Predator and directed such hits as Sister Act II, was being honored that evening for his work as an artist and humanitarian.

By The Editors
Early in “Thurgood,” the one-man play about Thurgood Marshall starring Laurence Fishburne now at Washington’s famed John F. Kennedy Center, Marshall recalls that during one of his first nights as an undergraduate at Pennsylvania’s historically black Lincoln University, he and several friends had a minor encounter in the nearby town with the kind of petty racism that was pervasive everywhere in America.

By Eisa Ulen
Powder Necklace, a young adult chapter book by first-time novelist Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond, explodes an awful reality for elite boarding school girls in Ghana. Despite the headmistress’ relentless insistence that her students are “duchesses” and the Dadaba Girls’ Secondary School is “The best” in the country, she can’t seem to summon the most basic of all human needs for the young women coming-of-age there: water. Forced to beg, borrow, and steal enough just to take a proper bath, Brew-Hammond’s characters face challenges most Western readers will find difficult to imagine – which makes the author’s decision to make the main character a British-born girl of Ghanaian descent a superb choice.

By Deborah Rudacille
Martha Cooper’s iconic photos of graffiti-sprayed subway trains, hooded teens wielding cans of Krylon in deserted yards, and skinny kids twisting and flipping on flattened cardboard boxes on the streets helped introduce hip hop culture to the world—even though neither she nor the kids thought of it in those terms at the time.

By Janet Singleton
Today Bridges is 44, and it has been 17 years since the former Diff’rent Strokes star has been on the bad side of the barbed wire. Killing Willis: From Diff’rent Strokes to the Mean Streets to the Life I Always Wanted is an update. And even a person who finds narcissistic celeb bios routinely loathsome (such as the author of this review) can see value in Bridges’ tale.

By Grace Aneiza Ali
Perhaps it was the sight of Sonia Sanchez, Toni Morrison, Cornel West, Kamau Brathwaite, and Amiri Baraka huddled together around a table at the conference’s awards reception and chatting it up like old pals out on the town for a Saturday night dinner, that was the most memorable. Theirs was a moment of legends.

By Janet Singleton
In defiance of his former teacher’s another-one-bites-the-dust mandate, Bradley went on to earn a PhD in English from Harvard.

By Stacey Patton
First, I’d like to thank members of the Academy for not awarding a slew of Oscars to what New York Press film critic Armond White called “the biggest con job of the year” –Precious: Based on the novel Push by Sapphire