Into America

Ed Forchion, also known as NJWeedman, was a casualty of the War on Drugs, incarcerated on weed charges at the end of the 1990s. Across the country, Black people were disproportionately harmed by the War on Drugs, and in New Jersey, the ACLU found that even in the last decade, if you’re Black you’re 3.5 times more likely to be arrested for weed.  But now, voters have opted to legalize recreational...

When Brent Leggs started as a preservationist with the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 2005, his first big project was to restore Joe Frazier’s Gym in Philadelphia. The late boxing champion’s former building was being turned into a discount furniture outlet. Brent and his colleagues knew the space had the power to tell a story of Black achievement and history, so they worked to restore...

Critical Race Theory. It feels like all of a sudden, this term is just everywhere.  White parents are protesting Critical Race Theory, falsely claiming it’s being used in social studies and anti-racist trainings to teach their children to hate themselves. Republican-led states across the country are introducing legislation to ban it from being taught in public schools. Fox News mentioned the term...

After George Floyd’s murder, police departments across the country faced criticisms of systemic bias and a failure to reflect the communities they patrol and so they worked to enact reforms. But diversifying efforts have been underway for years inside the Miami Police Department. Roughly a quarter of all officers in Miami PD are Black, which is a much greater percentage than the city’s overall Bla...

Saturday marks Juneteenth, when the last enslaved people in Galveston, Texas finally got word of their freedom in 1865. This came two years after the Emancipation Proclamation, which despite popular opinion did not automatically free every enslaved person. Washington D.C. was among the first cities to end slavery, doing so in April of 1862, months before President Abraham Lincoln’s historic speech...

In a world where being Black and free are not always congruent, Black folks in America have always found ways of escaping the strictures of this country’s racial boundaries.  In the summer, that meant leaving town, with kids getting sent South to visit relatives, road trips to safe swimming holes, and some heading to historically Black summer havens like Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachu...

100 years ago this week, a white mob burned down Tulsa's Greenwood District, a bustling business district. For decades, the government refused to acknowledge the Tulsa Race Massacre ever happened. Only now, 100 years later, is an effort is underway to identify mass graves in Tulsa. Trymaine Lee visits a mass grave site with Kavin Ross, a local journalist, activist, and descendent of victims of the...

100 years ago this week, the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma experienced one of the worst incidents of racial violence in this country’s history when a white mob laid siege to the prosperous Greenwood district. Greenwood was known as “Black Wall Street,” a nickname given by Booker T. Washington, for the number of wealthy Black families and Black owned businesses. In less than 48 hours, from May 31 to June...

Since the murder of George Floyd on May 25th 2020, America has been reeling from the shock of that initial violent act and the anguish that sent thousands into the streets in protest across the country.  And when those guilty verdicts were delivered, some were brought to tears that a black family had finally tasted something close to justice. But one verdict does little to untether America from it...

The world met Christopher Martin when he testified in the Derek Chauvin trial. Christopherwas just 18-years-old when he accepted a counterfeit $20 bill from George Floyd as a clerk at a Minneapolis Cup Foods. That bill led to a 911 call, and eventually George Floyd’s death. Christopher’s composed yet emotional testimony over his role and his guilt resonated across the country, but his own story is...

Black men are crying out. Suicide is one of the leading causes of death for young Black Americans and our young men are at particular risk. Stigmas, health care access, and social pressures to appear hyper-masculine stop a lot of Black men from getting help. But a grassroots program known as The Confess Project is trying to break this pattern.  The group started in Little Rock, Arkansas in 2016, a...

It often takes a tragedy to start a conversation around reform in this country.  So when two Black men, Duante Wright and Andrew Brown Jr., were killed by police last month as officers were attempting to serve arrest warrants, calls for warrant reform joined the chorus of other demands for change. Last week, Minnesota lawmakers began the process of trying to answer those calls and put forward a bi...

President Joe Biden spent his first 100 days in office passing the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill, rolling back executive orders signed by former President Donald Trump, and ramping up a massive vaccination program. 140 million Americans now have at least one dose of the vaccine. His approval ratings are generally high, around 53% according to a new NBC poll. Among Black Americans, it’s muc...

Three hundred and thirty-one days ago, Derek Chauvin put his knee on the neck of George Floyd for 9 minutes and 29 seconds. George Floyd took his last breath on his stomach, hands cuffed behind his back. His death, captured on cell phone video by 17-year-old Darnella Frazier, sparked a summer of unrest and calls to abolish the police around the country.  This week, after a televised trial and arou...

The filibuster is one of the better-known bits of procedure in the Senate. It might conjure images of politicians droning on for hours, or simply partisan gridlock, but the rule has an insidious, racial history. Senators have used it as a tool to block civil rights legislation since the later part of the 18th century.  But this history isn’t confined to the past. Today, the threat of a filibuster ...

It’s the second week of the trial of former Minneapolis police officerDerek Chauvin, and witnesses of all ages have been asked to recount what they saw on May 25th, 2020, as Chauvin kneeled on George Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes. Emotions in the courtroom have run high as witnesses have been asked to relive the trauma of last summer.  In this episode, Dr. BraVada Garrett-Akinsanya, founder...

Malcolm X and the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. met just one time in life, on March 26, 1964, during Congressional hearings for the Civil Rights Act. The two are often described as opposites, and their styles in the fight for Black freedom were undoubtedly different. But the men had a respect for each other that grew into a deep bond between the two families following their assassinations.  Today,...

Tucked inside the $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill signed by President Biden on March 11, 2021, is $5 billion worth of aid to help Black and disadvantaged farmers. The American Rescue Plan includes $4 billion to erase debt for any farmer with an outstanding loan that involves the USDA.  And an additional $1 billion dollars has been planned for training, technical assistance, and legal aid... all ai...

It’s been a month since an historic winter storm hit Jackson, Mississippi, leaving tens of thousands of residents without clean water, or without any water at all. Most of those residents were Black. Four weeks later, much of the capital city still has to boil water to drink.  Eighty-two percent of the residents in Jackson are Black and nearly a third live in poverty. Over the past several decades...

This week, jury selection began for the trial of Derek Chauvin, a former police office charged in the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis last summer. Juries hold tremendous power in our legal system. They determine who lives, who dies, and who goes free. The right to a jury of our peers is enshrined in the Constitution, guaranteeing us all the right to a “speedy and public trial, by an imparti...

Black Americans have been among the hardest hit by the coronavirus, but they aren't being vaccinated at the same rates as white Americans. Black people are receiving fewer than 7 percent of total vaccine doses, despite representing more than 13 percent of the population. This gap is often based on mistrust of the medical establishment, but there is more to the story. Issues of access mean many fol...

In the final installment of Harlem on My Mind, Trymaine Lee learns about the legacy of playwright Abram Hill, who used his work to center Black characters, Black audiences, and Black communities unapologetically. Abram Hill co-founded the American Negro Theater in 1940, operating a small 150-seat theater from the basement of Harlem’s Schomburg Center. The American Negro Theater, also known as the...

In Part 3 of Into America’s Black History Month series, Harlem on My Mind, Trymaine Lee spotlights the influence of Jessie Redmon Fauset. Langston Hughes called her one of the midwives of the Harlem Renaissance, but few today remember her name. As literary editor for NAACP’s The Crisis magazine, Fauset fostered the careers of many notable writers of the time: poets Countee Cullen and Gwendolyn Ben...

Into America continues its Black History Month series, Harlem on My Mind, following four figures from Harlem who defined Blackness for themselves and what it means to be Black in America today. The series begins when Trymaine Lee acquires a signed print by Jacob Lawrence titled “Schomburg Library.” The Schomburg Center for Research and Black Culture is based in Harlem, but its roots are on the isl...

This Black History Month, Into America launches Harlem on My Mind, a series that follows four figures from Harlem who defined Blackness for themselves and what it means to be Black in America today. The story begins in December, when host Trymaine Lee acquires something he coveted for years: a numbered print titled Schomburg Library by American icon Jacob Lawrence. The print came with a handwritte...