Sublime

In the case of Arthur McDuffie’s death, the officers who shattered his skull were charged with the crime. But a jury quickly returned a not guilty verdict and the city exploded on May 17 of 1980. This time 18 people died, 350 were injured, and 600 were arrested.

Something was wrong, everything was wrong. I went for a walk through the streets. My God, here I was again, roaming the town. I looked at the faces around me, and I knew mine was like theirs. Faces with the blood drained away, tight faces, worried, lost. Faces like flowers torn from their roots and stuffed into a pretty vase, the colors draining fa

He looked at the human beings he had chained up and noted that they seemed to be the type of people who wore chains. So unlike other people. Frighteningly unlike! Later, in his cotton fields, he had them whipped and then made them go back to work and thought, They can’t possibly feel as we do. You can whip them and they go back to work. And having

out of the window. “Kurshed’s a Paki.” We drove back to the house in silence.

when the United States one-upped the Soviet Union in the moon landing, from farther south, on Florida’s Space Coast, it wasn’t a victory in everyone’s eyes. The event was protested by an Alabaman civil rights leader. Ralph Abernathy arrived outside the gates of the Kennedy Space Center with five hundred people a few days before the launch. They bro

Among poor black youth who… carry a burning resentment of white society. To growl that one is a nigga is a seductive gesture… that can feel bitterly empowering.”

He poured his heart out in a missive to his little brother, now a respected art dealer himself. He likened himself to a caged bird in spring who feels deeply that it is time for him to do something important but cannot recall what it is, and so “bangs his head against the bars of his cage. And then the cage stays there and the bird is mad with suff