Blog
How Could You Not Know This?
Did you know there was a white woman who was murdered by the Klan because of her involvement in the American Civil Rights Movement? Did you know she was a wife and mother of five children? Did you know that among her last statements to her husband before she died was...
I Don’t Have a Racist Bone in My Body
I was returning home to Los Angeles on a flight from Atlanta, where I'd spent a couple of days at a writer’s conference. Weary from a weekend filled with late night poetry jams and early morning workshops, I boarded the half-empty redeye, found my aisle seat, shoved...
For Us, By Us
LUCRETIA AND JAMES MOTT ARE MY HEROES! Imagine you lived during a time when the clothes you wore were produced by slave labor. Oh... wait... that's right... if you're the average American, (or the average Earthling for that matter) it is highly likely that at...
“People of color…were tired of holding our hands.”
I saw the film Traces of the Trade and was impressed most by its courage and its frankness. It is definitely interesting to watch the transformation of the family members as they begin to realize exactly what the term “slave trade” means, and how the buying and...
James Breeden’s “Negro Woman”
(Photo: My father James H. Kelly | Great-great grandson of James Breeden and his "negro woman" On February 28, 1825, a white Tennessee farmer appeared before the Hawkins County Court with his enslaved black woman and two children he sired with her, with the intention...
Slave Traders’ Decendants Face Their Ugly Truth
THIS FILM GIVES ME HOPE! CHECK YOUR LOCAL (PBS) LISTINGS! I want to write something compelling that will make you want to NOT MISS THIS FILM, but every review I attempt does not do this documentary justice, so I'll just say TUNE IN to PBS and watch this one --...
A Scary, Twilight Zonish Thought
On a winter’s night in 2004, I was driving down Middlebelt Road in the Detroit suburb of Livonia, Michigan with two black teenagers—my daughter Akira and my nephew Nathan* (*not his real name). As I approached the freeway on-ramp and signaled to turn, I spotted a...
‘Back Then Slavery Was Legal and People Didn’t Think of it As wrong’
I can recall the exact moment my elementary school teacher fell off her greatest-teacher-in-the-world pedestal. It was a high, hard fall—I know because she fell on me, a freckle-faced “mixed-race” girl so blinded by love and admiration for the woman, I couldn’t have...
One on One with Tracey Edmonds: Serving Up a New Dish Called ‘Reality’
I am browsing the numerous awards on display in Tracey Edmonds’ expansive office when she enters through a private door, brightening up the already sun-drenched room with a radiance no cosmetic company could possibly take credit for. To call her beautiful is an...
One on One with Michael Clark Duncan: He’s Ready for Romance
Anyone who doubts the power of Hollywood to create bigger than life images that have little basis in reality should take note of actor Michael Clarke Duncan’s film career. On the big screen Duncan has been portrayed as an 8-foot giant—in real life he’s just under...
One on One with Don Cheadle: ‘We’re Getting Played’
Whatever we do, we should know that one day we will all face that man called ‘history’ and that day we should have a word to tell him. "–Paul Rusesabagina Imagine you lived in Kigali, Rwanda in April 1994 and you managed to survive the genocidal rampage that brutally...