After Alice Coltrane’s death in January 2007, the many who mourned her passing and celebrated her influence — from the jazz world, Hindu and new-age communities, and beyond — did so with a shared sadness and fervor, but for different reasons. They even called her by different names. To musicians …
As a student at Yale, Sheila Ducksworth often rushed home to indulge in two favorite guilty pleasures. She’d stop for dessert at Durfee’s Sweet Shoppe before catching up on her soap operas with a friend. She had grown up watching her stories. “Generations,” the NBC soap opera that debuted in …
Leah Barlow, a liberal studies professor at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, prepared to teach her Intro to African American Studies class this semester as she always does: She put together a syllabus, mapped out assignments and created a TikTok account to make the material as accessible as …
Come to the Center for Brooklyn History’s grand Romanesque Revival building in Brooklyn Heights looking for staid portraits of 19th-century burghers, and you’ll find them. But on a recent evening, Mildred Jones, an 87-year-old retired schoolteacher born in Bedford-Stuyvesant, was pondering a less expected large-scale oil portrait — of herself. …
Pernell Cezar’s coffee company, BLK & Bold, was operating out of the back of a brewery with three employees when he got his big break: an audience with a buyer at a Target Black History Month expo. By January 2020, bags of his Rise & GRND roast were on Target …
Barry Michael Cooper, who was one of the first journalists to explore the crack epidemic of the 1980s before turning to Hollywood, where he made his mark with screenplays for gritty films like “New Jack City,” died on Jan. 21 in Baltimore. He was 66. His death, in a hospital, …
By bending time and leaning on nonlinear storytelling, “Nickel Boys” joins a recent trend of contemporary Black filmmakers relinquishing the impulse to frame Black stories chronologically. Adapted from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Nickel Boys,” RaMell Ross’s film tells the story of Elwood (Ethan Herisse), an idealistic Black kid …
The number of people in the United States who develop dementia each year will double over the next 35 years to about one million annually by 2060, a new study estimates, and the number of new cases per year among Black Americans will triple. The increase will primarily be due …
Toya Lillard is not a real estate agent. But she had the practiced patter of one, a few weeks ago, while giving a tour of the new headquarters of 651 Arts, a Brooklyn organization dedicated to African diasporic performance. For an arts administrator, she’s been giving a lot of tours …