AMPLIFYING DIVERSE VOICES

The untold story of how Howard University came to be known as ‘The Mecca’. If you ask just about anyone at Howard University what’s the other name for their school, they will readily tell you: “The Mecca.” The name has been extolled by former students, such as acclaimed author Ta-Nehisi Coates, who wrote in his 2015 book “Between the World and Me” that his “only Mecca was, is, and shall always be Howard University.” But ask anyone in the Howard community how and when the school came to be known as The Mecca – a question I’ve been researching for the past year – and blank stares are mostly the response. In a 2019 article, The New York Times tried to find the origins of the use of the term for Howard when U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris, one of the school’s most well-known alumnae, was still a 20...

Gospel singer Mahalia Jackson made a suggestion during the 1963 March on Washington − and it changed a good speech to a majestic sermon on an American dream. Every now and then, a voice can matter. Mahalia Jackson had one of them. Known around the world as the “Queen of Gospel,” Jackson used her powerful voice to work in the Civil Rights Movement. Starting in the 1950s, she traveled with Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. throughout the South and heard him preach in Black churches about a vision that only he could see. But on Aug. 28, 1963, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, something didn’t quite sound right to Jackson as she listened to King deliver his prepared speech. King was reading from his prepared remarks when she made a simple suggestion. “Tell them about the dream, Martin,” she u...

What do you want to know about LGBTQ+ issues? We want to hear from you, our readers, about what we should be reporting and how we can serve you. Get in touch here. June is a month of joy, resistance and celebration. In addition to Pride, a celebration of queer identities that stemmed from the Stonewall uprising, June is also Black Music Month. Black musical traditions, originating in Africa and remixed in the many places Africans were distributed, have left their mark on music worldwide. From gospel to country, from jazz to the blues, from hip-hop to rock and roll, traces of Black entertainers can be found at the roots of many genres. And Black, queer musicians have been there all the way. When Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton recorded her bluesy hit song “Hound Dog” in 1952, she did it h...

With religious affiliation on the decline, continuing racism and increasing income inequality, some scholars and activists are soul-searching about the Black church’s role in today’s United States. The exterior view of the Bethel African American Methodist Episcopal Church at 125 S. 6th St. in Philadelphia. Breton, William L., circa 1773-1855 Artist via the Library of Congress, World Digital Library For instance, on April 20, 2010, an African American Studies professor at Princeton, Eddie S. Glaude, sparked an online debate by provocatively declaring that, despite the existence of many African American churches, “the Black Church, as we’ve known it or imagined it, is dead.” As he argued, the image of the Black church as a center for Black life and as a beacon of social and moral transform...

Shirley Chisholm was a trailblazer: the first Black woman elected to Congress and the first Black candidate and the first woman candidate for a major-party nomination for president of the United States. Still, despite her tremendous influence on American politics, biographies of Chisholm have been immensely hard to come across. With her recently released book, “Shirley Chisholm: Champion of Black Feminist Power Politics,” Anastasia C. Curwood, a professor and interim chair of the Department of History at the University of Kentucky, hopes to alleviate this gap. A cradle-to-grave biography as Curwood calls it, the book gives insight into who Chisholm was as a person and how Chisolm’s many lived experiences and multiple identities shaped who she was. In the book, Curwood coins the term “Blac...