By George E. Curry
I thought I knew Cornel West, the most public of public intellectuals. But it was not until I read his memoir, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud that I realized how much I didn’t know about my friend.

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 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 TaRessa Stovall
Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie,  a writer since age 7, was challenged to give the talk of her life in under 20 minutes. The result is nothing less than spellbinding.

By Eisa Nefertari Ulen
Rock and Roll is falsely thought of as white music—and not just by white people. Black folk have tended to identify Rock and Roll with the other side of the color line, leaving Black Rock in a ridiculously marginal place.

By James McBride
This is my nightmare: My daughter comes home with a guy and says, “Dad we’re getting married.”

And he’s a rapper, with a mouthful of gold teeth, a do-rag on his head, muscles popping out his arms, and a thug attitude. And then the nightmare gets deeper.

By Mark Lassiter
One summer evening in 1991, I pulled into a gas station at the corner of Ponce De Leon and Piedmont Avenue, in Atlanta. A man, about 5′10”, in a midnight blue three-piece suit, with a pair of blue plastic wrap around sunglasses and a blue silk scarf was paying his bill with cash. What does one say to James Brown?

By Janet Singleton
The very discussion of what black women do to make African hair match Eurocentric images, and placate racism, remains one of the few subjects in America that remains taboo.