Paul Laurence Dunbar was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Born in Dayton, Ohio, to parents who had been enslaved in Kentucky before the American Civil War, Dunbar began writing stories and verse when he was a child. He published his first poems at the age of 16 in a Dayton newspaper, and served as president of his high school's literary society.
Ebony is a monthly magazine that focuses on news, culture, and entertainment. Its target audience is the African-American community, and its coverage includes the lifestyles and accomplishments of influential black people, fashion, beauty, and politics.
Barack Hussein Obama II is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, Obama was the first African-American president of the United States. He previously served as a U.S. senator from Illinois from 2005 to 2008 and as an Illinois state senator from 1997 to 2004, and previously worked as a civil rights lawyer before entering politics.
Derrick Albert Bell Jr. was an American lawyer, professor, and civil rights activist. Bell worked for first the U.S. Justice Department, then the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, where he supervised over 300 school desegregation cases in Mississippi.
Jordan Carlos is an American stand-up comedian who played a recurring character on The Colbert Report and is a co-host on the Nickelodeon kids' show Me TV. He also appeared as a panelist and reporter on The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore.
Shelby Steele is an author, columnist, documentary film maker, and a Robert J. and Marion E. Oster Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He specializes in the study of race relations, multiculturalism, and affirmative action.
Anthony Kapel "Van" Jones is an American news and political commentator, author, and lawyer. He is the co-founder of several non-profit organizations, a three-time New York Times bestselling author, a CNN host and contributor, and an Emmy Award winner.
Jonathan Edward Favreau is an American political commentator, podcaster, and the former director of speechwriting for President Barack Obama.
Frank Marshall Davis was an American journalist, poet, political and labor movement activist, and businessman.
Barack Obama, who served as the 44th President of the United States, has elicited a number of public perceptions regarding his personality and background. As the first African-American President of the United States, his race and culture played a prominent role, both positively and negatively.
"I Have a Dream" is a public speech that was delivered by American civil rights activist and Baptist minister, Martin Luther King Jr., during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963. In the speech, King called for civil and economic rights and an end to racism in the United States. Delivered to over 250,000 civil rights supporters from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., the speech was a defining moment of the civil rights movement and among the most iconic speeches in American history.
The keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention (DNC) was given by the Illinois State Senator, United States senatorial candidate, and future President Barack Obama on the night of Tuesday, July 27, 2004, in Boston, Massachusetts. His unexpected landslide victory in the March 2004 Illinois U.S. Senate Democratic primary made him a rising star within the national Democratic Party overnight, and led to the reissue of his memoir, Dreams from My Father. His keynote address was well received, which further elevated his status within the Democratic Party and led to his reissued memoir becoming a bestseller.
On July 16, 2009, Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested at his Cambridge, Massachusetts home by local police officer Sgt. James Crowley, who was responding to a 911 caller's report of men breaking and entering the residence. The arrest initiated a series of events that unfolded under the spotlight of the international news media.
Post-racial United States is a theoretical environment in which the United States is free from racial preference, discrimination, and prejudice.
The African American Policy Forum (AAPF) is a social justice think tank focused on issues of gender and diversity. AAPF seeks to build bridges between arts, activism, and the academy in order to address structural inequality and systemic oppression. AAPF develops and promotes frameworks and strategies that address a vision of racial justice that embraces the intersections of race, gender, class, and the array of barriers that disempower those who are marginalized in society.
Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, colloquially referred to as DACA, is a United States immigration policy that allows some individuals with unlawful presence in the United States after being brought to the country as children to receive a renewable two-year period of deferred action from deportation and become eligible for an employment authorization document in the U.S. To be eligible for the program, recipients cannot have felonies or serious misdemeanors on their records. Unlike the proposed DREAM Act, DACA does not provide a path to citizenship for recipients. The policy, an executive branch memorandum, was announced by President Barack Obama on June 15, 2012. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) began accepting applications for the program on August 15, 2012.
Kevin Merida is an American journalist, author and newspaper editor. He currently serves as executive editor at the Los Angeles Times, where he oversees and coordinates all news gathering operations, including city and national desks, Sports and Features departments, Times Community News and Los Angeles Times en Español.
Between the World and Me is a 2015 nonfiction book written by American author Ta-Nehisi Coates and published by Spiegel & Grau. It is written as a letter to the author's teenage son about the feelings, symbolism, and realities associated with being Black in the United States. Coates recapitulates American history and explains to his son the "racist violence that has been woven into American culture." Coates draws from an abridged, autobiographical account of his youth in Baltimore, detailing the ways in which institutions like the school, the police, and even "the streets" discipline, endanger, and threaten to disembody black men and women. The work takes structural and thematic inspiration from James Baldwin's 1963 epistolary book The Fire Next Time. Unlike Baldwin, Coates sees white supremacy as an indestructible force, one that Black Americans will never evade or erase, but will always struggle against.
The history of the United States from 2008 to the present began with the collapse of the housing bubble, which led to the Great Recession. The resulting economic downturn and general discontent led Barack Obama to win the presidential election in 2008, becoming the country's first African-American president. Obama's domestic agenda notably included economic stimulus packages and the Affordable Care Act. 2011 saw the formal end to the Iraq War as well as the killing of Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. The War on Terror continued with a shift in attention toward the Islamic State in the 2010s.
Krissah Williams Thompson is an American journalist at The Washington Post. In 2020, Thompson was named the Managing Editor of Diversity and Inclusion, and is the first African American woman to hold the position of Managing Editor at The Washington Post.
