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In Atlanta, Every Day Was MLK Day

If You Grow Up Black in King’s Hometown, You Can’t Help But See His Story Intertwine with Your Own

By Errin Whack
January 19, 2015

To grow up in Atlanta is to be always aware of the story of Martin Luther King, Jr., and to see it intertwine with your own fate.

I was born there in 1978, less than a mile from the house where King grew up. As a schoolchild, I like others, visited Atlanta’s Auburn Avenue—the street where King was born, worked, died, and is honored. To see King’s neighborhood, and the home he was born in, humanized him for us children, letting …

What Color Should a Quarterback Be?

How James Harris Changed the NFL’s Marquee Role

By Samuel G. Freedman
September 22, 2014

An hour or two before kickoff on the night of August 15, 1969, a rookie quarterback named James Harris noticed a well-dressed man about a foot shorter than him approaching through the tunnel beneath Detroit’s Tiger Stadium. His 5-foot-4 height notwithstanding, the man was a former NFL running back named Buddy Young. More to the point of this encounter, Young was now the first black executive in the league’s front office.

People Died So I Could Vote

It’s Hard Not to Go to the Polls When a Generation of African-Americans Risked—and Sometimes Lost—Their Lives to Get You There

By Jocelyn Y. Stewart
September 22, 2014

When we were growing up in South Los Angeles, my siblings and I often heard my dad’s impromptu sermons about matters of importance: the value of education, the perils of purchasing on credit, the virtue of hard work, and the dire necessity of voting.

Why Are Americans So Obsessed with Genealogy?

How Studying the Family Tree—Long the Province of Racists and Social Climbers—Became the Country’s Second Most Popular Hobby

By Gregory Rodriguez
May 12, 2014

Alex Haley, author of the hugely popular 1976 book Roots, once said that black Americans needed their own version of Plymouth Rock, a genesis story that didn’t begin—or end—at slavery. His 900-page American family saga, which reached back to 18th-century Gambia, certainly delivered on that.

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