Raised in Berkeley, California, amidst the activism of the Black Panther movement and the tumult of the Vietnam War, Wilson was imbued with a nuanced perspective on justice, informed by empathy and critical analysis. His educational path through Harvard College and Harvard Law School further honed his legal approach.

Wilson’s commitment to justice is deeply personal.

“I very much care about people,” he states, emphasizing his dedication to ensuring fairness within the court system. “And if that ends up making me liberal in somebody’s mind, OK. But, what I care about is that people who come into the court system, whatever the result is, think that the court system is treated unfairly.”

As the administrative head of the Unified Court System, with its 16,000 employees and a $3 billion budget, Wilson faces numerous challenges. He has particularly focused on addressing the needs within the family courts.

“It is more judges and the legislature and governor have given us more judges. And we’ve asked for even more, and we will get those. We need in addition to the judges, obviously, more court clerks, the court officers,” Wilson articulates, emphasizing the broader scope of necessities. “It’s not just that the courts need resources, it’s if we’re going to try and provide better outcomes for people, the state needs to have better resources for care both before people wind up in court.”

The issue of evictions in New York City, which have returned to pre-pandemic levels with approximately 1,450 evictions in January, is a significant concern for Wilson. He identifies the lack of affordable housing as a core problem, pointing out the judiciary’s limited capacity to address the systemic issues of housing scarcity and poverty.

Wilson made history as the first Black partner at Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP, emphasizing his leadership in promoting diversity and inclusion, particularly through his efforts to recruit Black candidates. This landmark achievement not only marked a personal milestone but also reflected his commitment to enriching the legal profession’s diversity.

Wilson is acutely aware of the complexities surrounding minor offenses, particularly in light of the increasing complaints of retail theft, which have surged by 77% from 2017 to 2022, according to data from the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice. This context informs his reflections on the broader implications of such offenses within the justice system.

“If somebody steals, you know, a tube of toothpaste, which happens, right happens a fair amount, they need the toothpaste. But it also means we shouldn’t send them in Rikers, because they stole a tube of toothpaste, they probably have a variety of needs, some of them just poverty,” Wilson explains, underscoring the need for a justice system that addresses the root causes of offenses beyond mere punitive measures.

Justices of the New York Court of Appeals, including the chief judge, are appointed to 14-year terms. However, Wilson, who will turn 70 in 2030, is subject to the mandatory retirement age for judges in New York, meaning he will only be able to serve 7 years of his term.

Reflecting on his tenure, Wilson sees his role as a unique opportunity to effect meaningful change.

“I still consider this moving on up because I’m able to do much more good for the people of New York here in this job,” he notes.

With an acute awareness of the limited time he has to make an impact, he adds, “And you know, time is ticking. I have until 2030 before I age out of the job. And I’m going to try and use every single one of those years to the best of my ability.”

“We express ourselves through our hair,” stylist Tamekia Swint tells TODAY.com. “It is deeply entrenched in our culture and in our history. And it connects us to one and another. Our hair is a huge part of our identity.”

For some transracial adoptive parents, however, Black hair can be a source of anxiety.

That’s why in 2011, Swint founded Styles 4 Kidz, a non-profit salon in Illinois that focuses on textured hair education for transracial adoptive parents and their children. Swint offers a range of services including cornrows, braids and twists, as well as one-on-one training sessions, online courses and workshops.

Swint found her calling thanks to a chance introduction to a woman named Mary. 

“A Black mom in my local church knew I liked doing hair and she was like, ‘My friend Mary needs your help,’” Swint recalls. 

When Swint first met Mary, a white mom who had two adopted Black daughters, she says she nearly “burst into tears” at the state of the girls’ hair, which was dry and badly entangled.

“I didn’t want to cry because I didn’t want Mary to feel bad, but it was awful,” Swint says. “At that point, I had no idea this was a national problem.”

Mary and her daughters became Swint’s first clients.

“You should have seen their faces when they looked in the mirror after I was finished. It completely transformed not only how they looked, but how they felt about themselves,” Swint says. “And that’s how Styles 4 Kidz started. I realized this was a much bigger problem.”

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Swint says many parents come in while they’re in the process of adopting.

“By the time they have their child, they know all about the products and how to use them. They’re going into the situation fully prepared,” Swint explains. “What we’re doing is preventing experiences like the one Mary and her daughters had.”

Rosalinda Christmon and her daughter, Mia, now 18, are former Styles 4 Kidz clients. 

“My husband saw a Caucasian woman at our local pool. He came home and said, ‘She had African American daughters and their hair was braided so beautifully,’” Christmon tells TODAY.com “Then he goes, ‘I need to find out who she uses’.”

The woman at the pool was Mary. Mary happily connected the Christmons with Swint — and in the knick of time.

“Mia was 6 or 7, and I had been struggling a lot with her hair,” Christmon says. “She’d cry when we would try to comb it.”

Christmon notes that she is “forever grateful” for the education she received in Swint’s salon. She believes hair training should be mandatory for adoptive parents. 

“It’s just as important as finding the right pediatrician,” Christmon says.

Tamiah Bridgett-Alexander couldn’t agree more. Bridgett-Alexander, who specializes in natural hair, hosts Black hair classes for foster parents and families in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of the organizations she works with is the Foster the Love Project.

“I caution all parents, but especially transracial adoptive parents, from putting in extensions too early. Same with straightening, because it’s teaching the child that their natural texture is inherently unacceptable,” Bridgett-Alexander tells TODAY.com. “Having white hair was the standard of beauty for too long.”

Using positive language is just as important as choosing the right style products, according to Bridgett-Alexander.

“Black hair can be seen as a burden. You want to avoid sighing and saying things like, ‘This is going to take hours,’” she explains. “You want these kids to have a good experience when they’re getting their hair done. Make it bonding time. Let’s disrupt the generational trauma of our hair being a burden.”

Transracial adoptee Angela Tucker previously told TODAY she she believes all adoptive parents should outsource when they can.

“Understand that there are some things as a white person that you cannot teach your Black kid,” Tucker said. “Think of it like piano lessons. If your mom doesn’t play piano, then she’ll find a piano teacher for you. And there’s no shame in that.” 

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Since 2019, Moss has made her own annual “call to action to support Black films,” a grassroots effort that has gained momentum through collaborations with local businesses and social media influencers. Saturday marks the fifth NBMD, and Moss said this year is distinct because filmgoers have multiple strong Black films to check out.

In Atlanta, New York, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Houston and Chicago, students at historically Black colleges, civic organization members and others are planning to flood theaters, host watch parties at home and bask in Black film.

“It’s truly gratifying to know that movie lovers across the country will be gathering to celebrate the legacy of Black storytelling,” said Moss, the president of the National Black Movie Association in Washington, D.C., her hometown. “We are all celebrating Black life and culture on the big screen.”

The day has grown from its infancy, when awareness stretched to just a few cities. Moss said she expects thousands to participate in National Black Movie Day, with Oscar-nominated films like “American Fiction” and “The Color Purple” screened alongside thought-provoking movies like “Origin,” “The Book of Clarence,” “One Love” and many others in theaters or streaming.

“I’m a big believer in ‘You cannot be what you cannot see,’” said actor David Oyelowo, who supports NBMD.

“So National Black Movie Day is important. People need to know we exist. They need to know our films exist. We need to celebrate our films. And so, I support anything and everything that redresses the balance of the undervaluing of the things we make.”

But the fact that Moss felt compelled to create a day to focus on Black films underscores a point: Despite the uptick in movies, there’s always concern these efforts will erode, Oyelowo and others said.

“I don’t think we can afford to make the mistake we’ve made in the past or thinking that a moment like this is the new normal,” the actor said. “In the wake of the George Floyd murder and all of those promises and policies that were made not just by Hollywood, but beyond as well, we see a dramatic pullback and a dramatic lack of meeting those promises. There is a very real chance that in the next two to three years, there will be another call of ‘Oscars So White,’ so we cannot afford to rest on our laurels. We cannot afford to stop keeping the industry accountable, but also we cannot afford to keep asking to be let into spaces and places that probably weren’t really designed with us in mind.”

One 2023 study showed that the number of films released in 2022 with at least one main Black lead actor increased by 30.1% over the previous year. However, the number of films with Black stories at the center decreased by 16.7% to just 35.

“We still have a really, really, really, really, long ways to go,” said John Gibson, vice president of external and multicultural affairs for the Motion Picture Association.

While more TV shows across different platforms feature Black stars and creatives, “we still have a very long way to go with movies,” he said. “But we know when studios put forth a concerted effort by hiring great writers that can speak to our shared experience and their lived experiences, they can produce authentic stories about us. And that’s important because nowadays you have to have authentic portrayals of our communities. The stereotypes of a lot of years ago, they’re just not going to work.”

Oyelowo, who starred as Martin Luther King Jr. in “Selma,” among many other distinguished roles, teamed with “Red Tails” co-star Nate Parker to form Mansa, a free online streaming network for Black filmmakers.

Like Moss, he said they created Mansa “out of necessity. I love working in Hollywood. But we have been in the industry for a long time now and we’ve made things that we’re very proud of, but we almost always have to beg people who don’t necessarily share our cultural experience, or the value that we place on some of the things we make. We almost always have to go to them to distribute the work, to hopefully value the work, to market the work, to be the ones to communicate to our audience what the work is and what its value and intention are.”

The platform’s name pays homage to Mansa Musa, a 14th-century West African emperor who may have been the richest man of all time.

“There’s something incredibly empowering to know that the richest man and the richest kingdom the world has ever seen was African,” Oyelowo said. “And that’s how we think of Mansa. There is a wealth of films that the general public might not be aware of, or Black people might not be aware of, because they were not given the platform. There’s a wealth of talent. There’s a wealth of content. There’s a wealth of culture that, globally speaking, the value of it is not being yelled from the rooftops in a way it should be.” 

Those perceived shortcomings have driven National Black Movie Day and Mansa, which both aim to educate and inspire Black moviegoers while being a force behind Black films.

“It just felt like the right time — a combination of probably a buildup of frustration, but also just recognizing that streaming has shown us that there is a gap between what Hollywood says the global audience wants to see and what the data is telling us,” Oyelowo said. 

Gibson has studied the data as well, and he said for Black people and films, it comes down to a basic concept: “People want to see themselves and they want to see 360-degree versions of themselves,” he said. “And so you have to do accurate portrayals of communities, and they aren’t always pretty. But you balance them with the aspirational, the inspirational and escapism content.”

“So, we have a responsibility to make sure that we have writers and directors and cinematographers from all of these amazing communities to present fair and balanced portrayals.”

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Black Girls Cook was founded upon its founder, Nicole Mooney, realizing that African American women in her community were prone to developing health issues — such as heart disease and diabetes — more than other groups and how a healthier diet could help improve the situation.

Black women are two times more likely than white women to be diagnosed with or die from Type 2 diabetes, according to 2019 data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. 

Compared to white women, Black women also lead in rates of high blood pressure, stroke and heart disease. 

The nonprofit has been empowering and inspiring inner-city adolescent Black girls ages 8-15 through culinary arts and urban farming with an emphasis on Black Diaspora cultural histories and food practices for the past decade.

Teach. Inspire. Love.

The recipes are infused with lessons about Black Diaspora history. The methodology gives them a glimpse of why this particular food is important for their community in addition to breaking down the stereotype around it.

By the end of the three-week program, the girls not only learn to cook cultural meals, such as chicken pot pie and spiced pumpkin bread, but also how to make health-conscious decisions.

Black Girls Cook has partnered with The Miami Dade Library System to host a series of Black History-themed cooking classes this month.

Participants will learn how to make a rotisserie chicken and watermelon salad while exploring the invaluable contributions of the Black community to the world of food. 

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Each week through the month of February, the theater chain will have two daily showings of a different $5 Fan Fave deal for one of the spotlighted films.

Beginning February 2, through February 29, 175 AMC locations will offer two daily showings of the following films:

• Week of Feb. 2– “The Equalizer 3”
• Week of Feb. 9 – “Spider-man: Across the Spider-verse”
• Week of Feb. 16 – “The Color Purple”
• Week of Feb. 22 – “Soul”

“Black filmmakers and actors have given the world some of the most inspiring and captivating cinematic experiences, and that tradition has continued over the past few years with some amazing films that span multiple genres,” the company said in a statement.

“Through the Black History Month $5 Fan Faves program, AMC Theatres is honoring those ongoing contributions by giving moviegoers the opportunity to revisit a curated selection of recent beloved films starring or created by exceptional Black film producers and actors, including Denzel Washington, Oprah Winfrey, Shameik Moore, and Daveed Diggs.”

Click here to learn more about the films and participating theaters.

Black History Month Feb 1

Here's how you can celebrate Black history this February

Feb 1

What you need to know about the origins of Black History Month

From its 1900s beginnings to modern-day recognition, here’s what you need to know about celebrating Black History Month and some ways to celebrate:

What is the history of Black History Month?

Carter G. Woodson was an early scholar of African American history. Dubbed “the father of Black history,” he founded the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. He launched The Journal of African American History, the association’s scholarly publication, in 1916 — half a century after the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in the U.S.

Woodson was determined to dedicate time to celebrating the historic contributions of Black people, leading him to establish Negro History Week in February 1926.

Over the years, mayors of cities across the nation also began recognizing Negro History Week. By the late 1960s, catalyzed by the Civil Rights movement and efforts to transform race relations, Negro History Week evolved into Black History Month for many schools and communities.

In 1976, President Gerald Ford officially recognized Black History Month as a national observance, encouraging Americans to “seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of Black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.”

Why do we celebrate Black History Month in February?

February is the birth month of two prominent figures who contributed to the freedom of enslaved African Americans. 

President Abraham Lincoln, born on Feb. 12, issued the Emancipation Proclamation during the third year of the Civil War, which declared enslaved people living within the rebellious states free and linked the issue of slavery directly to the war.

Frederick Douglass was born enslaved and later became a leader in the abolitionist movement. His date of birth was not recorded, but he celebrated his birthday on Feb. 14.

Woodson chose the second week of February for Negro History Week to honor their birthdays and legacies.

Since 1976, every U.S. president after Ford has officially designated February as Black History Month.

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What is the 2024 Black History Month theme?

Black History Month has a different theme every year.

Woodson believed providing a theme was essential to focus the public’s attention. The ASALH said it selects themes that “reflect changes in how people of African descent in the United States have viewed themselves, the influence of social movements on racial ideologies, and the aspirations of the Black community.”

The theme of this year’s Black History Month is African Americans and the Arts.

“African American artists have used art to preserve history and community memory as well as for empowerment. Artistic and cultural movements such as the New Negro, Black Arts, Black Renaissance, hip-hop, and Afrofuturism, have been led by people of African descent and set the standard for popular trends around the world,” reads the ASALH description of its choice for its 2024 focal point.

How to learn and celebrate Black history

There are various ways to celebrate the month and educate yourself on Black history.

Here are just a few ideas to get you started:

Support Black-owned businesses and artists

Many top shopping sites like Amazon, Yelp and Door Dash allow you to filter for Black-owned businesses and restaurants. Try it out next time you place an online order.

Find online celebrations

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture is providing free online programming this month. You can view the full calendar here.

Attend local events

Check your city and state government websites for Black History Month events like art and music workshops, film screenings and more.

Watch a movie

Watch one of these 28 films to learn more about the Black experience. Most are available on Netflix, Amazon Prime or other popular streaming services.

More options include researching Black history in your community and reading Black literature.

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared on this site in 2023.

How did Black History Month start?

It was Carter G. Woodson, a founder of the Association for the Study of African American History, who first came up with the idea of the celebration that became Black History Month. Woodson, the son of recently freed Virginia slaves, who went on to earn a Ph.D in history from Harvard, originally came up with the idea of Negro History Week to encourage Black Americans to become more interested in their own history and heritage. Woodson worried that Black children were not being taught about their ancestors’ achievements in American schools in the early 1900s.

“If a race has no history, if it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated,” Woodson said.

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Why is Black History Month in February?

Woodson chose February for Negro History Week because it had the birthdays of President Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. Lincoln was born on Feb. 12, and Douglass, a former slave who did not know his exact birthday, celebrated his on Feb. 14.

Daryl Michael Scott, a Howard University history professor and former ASAAH president, said Woodson chose that week because Black Americans were already celebrating Lincoln’s and Douglass’s birthdays. With the help of Black newspapers, he promoted that week as a time to focus on African-American history as part of the celebrations that were already ongoing.

The first Negro History Week was announced in February 1926.

“This was a community effort spearheaded by Woodson that built on tradition, and built on Black institutional life and structures to create a new celebration that was a week long, and it took off like a rocket,” Scott said.

Why the change from a week to a month?

Negro History Week was wildly successful, but Woodson felt it needed more.

Woodson’s original idea for Negro History Week was for it to be a time for student showcases of the African-American history they learned the rest of the year, not as the only week Black history would be discussed, Scott said. Woodson later advocated starting a Negro History Year, saying that during a school year “a subject that receives attention one week out of 36 will not mean much to anyone.”

Individually several places, including West Virginia in the 1940s and Chicago in the 1960s, expanded the celebration into Negro History Month. The civil rights and Black Power movement advocated for an official shift from Black History Week to Black History Month, Scott said, and, in 1976, on the 50th anniversary of the beginning of Negro History Week, the Association for the Study of African American History made the shift to Black History Month.

Presidential recognition

Every president since Gerald R. Ford through Joe Biden has issued a statement honoring the spirit of Black History Month.

Ford first honored Black History Week in 1975, calling the recognition “most appropriate,” as the country developed “a healthy awareness on the part of all of us of achievements that have too long been obscured and unsung.” The next year, in 1976, Ford issued the first Black History Month commemoration, saying with the celebration “we can seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of Black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.”

President Jimmy Carter added in 1978 that the celebration “provides for all Americans a chance to rejoice and express pride in a heritage that adds so much to our way of life.” President Ronald Reagan said in 1981 that “understanding the history of Black Americans is a key to understanding the strength of our nation.”

Editor’s note: This article by former AP reporter Jesse J. Holland was originally published on Feb. 2, 2017.

Jackson, the first Black woman to serve on the nation’s highest court, spoke at the 60th anniversary of the Sept. 15, 1963 bombing at 16th Street Baptist Church.

“Today we remember the toll that was paid to secure the blessings of liberty for African Americans and we grieve those four children who were senselessly taken from this earth and their families robbed of their potential,” Jackson said.

She said the country should celebrate the great strides that have been made since 1963 but that there is still work to do. ”The work of our time is maintaining that hard-won freedom and to that we are going to need the truth, the whole truth about our past,” Jackson said.

Jackson said she knows that atrocities “like the one we are memorializing today are difficult to remember and relive” but said it is also “dangerous to forget them.”

“If we are going to continue to move forward as a nation, we cannot allow concerns about discomfort to displace knowledge, truth or history. It is certainly the case that parts of this country’s story can be hard to think about,” Jackson said.

Jackson did not mention any of the efforts in Republican-led states to place parameters on how race is discussed in classrooms. Instead, Jackson, who was born in 1970, gave the example of how her own parents made sure, even at a young age, that she learned about what happened in Birmingham, Selma and other battlegrounds of the Civil Rights Movement.

“Yes, our past is filled with too much violence, too much hatred, too much prejudice, but can we really say that we are not confronting those same evils now? We have to own even the darkest parts of our past, understand them and vow never to repeat them,” Jackson said.

Klansmen had placed a bundle of dynamite outside the church under a set of stairs on that day in 1963. The girls were gathered in a downstairs washroom before Sunday services when the blast exploded at 10:22 am. The explosion killed 11-year-old Denise McNair, and Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Addie Mae Collins, all 14. A fifth little girl, Sarah Collins Rudolph, the sister of Addie Mae, was in the room and was severely injured — losing an eye to the explosion— but survived.

The bombing came during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, eight months after then-Gov. George Wallace pledged, “segregation forever,” and two weeks after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his iconic, “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington.

Hundreds of people, Black and white, filled the church Friday for the remembrance. The church bell tolled four times as the names of the girls were read. The crowd also stood to honor Rudolph, the “fifth little girl” in the room that day.

U.S. Rep. Terri Sewell said they were standing on solemn ground where the senseless deaths “awakened a slumbering consciousness of America and galvanized the Civil Rights Movement.”

For many, Jackson’s presence at the church was a poignant moment. Sewell and other speakers on Friday said the lives of the four slain Black girls are in a way intertwined with Jackson’s. They said she is the embodiment of what civil rights foot soldiers in the 1960s dreamed would be possible, and the Voting Rights Act and other gains that followed paved the way for the first Black woman on the Supreme Court.

“It has been 60 years in the making. Dr. Martin Luther King said that these girls would not have died in vain and our speaker, Ketanji Brown Jackson, is the personification of that today. She is that hope,” former U.S. Sen. Doug Jones said.

It’s this disparity that inspired Shareef McDonald, better known as Ross Mac, to become a financial educator. Not only has systemic oppression made it harder for Black Americans to build wealth, but there’s a huge education gap that prevents many from finding financial success, he says. 

To bridge that gap, the 33-year-old created the Maconomics digital series where he combines his Wall Street experience and Chicago street smarts to create informative financial content aimed specifically at the Black community.

It started when Mac was an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania and realized this Ivy League education was an opportunity that many from his community could never imagine. He refused to take that for granted.

Here’s how he’s using what he’s learned to empower and uplift those without the same opportunities he had.

Learning the tricks of the trade

Mac’s wake-up call to start investing came early in his undergraduate career. 

“I was in an econ 101 class sitting next to a kid who was day-trading in the middle of class,” Mac tells CNBC Make It. “That was the one thing that opened my eyes and my curiosity and made me say, ‘OK, I want to start investing.'”

From there, Mac opened a brokerage account, which at the time wasn’t as straightforward and low-cost as getting started investing is now, he says. But he was determined to get on the same level as his peers.

His interest in investing and wealth management eventually led him to a career on Wall Street. Mac spent his summers during college interning at Morgan Stanley and Barclays. After graduation, he worked for Morgan Stanley full-time as a sales analyst. 

“I truly realized I’ve been lucky because I was exposed to so many different things,” Mac says. “Not only did I have a good job, but the type of conversations that I was around — being able to walk down the aisle and see a senior member on my team checking his 401(k) and seeing two or three million dollars — it’s like, ‘Oh, I need to start thinking about retirement now.'”

In 2015, Mac returned to his hometown of Chicago after three years on Wall Street armed with the experience and motivation to bring financial literacy education to his community.

Bringing Wall Street to Main Street

For Mac, exposure to the investing big leagues was his biggest teacher, and he recognized that kids and adults from his own community probably wouldn’t have the same learning opportunity. While working for Morgan Stanley, he began exploring ways to share what he learned.

Making music as the “Wall Street Rapper,” Mac began fusing the worlds he’d come to know so well: Black and urban hip-hop culture with Wall Street financial know-how. He saw a need for someone to speak the language of Black communities like his in Chicago.

“Ever since I was a kid, one of the things we always argued about was who’s better, Iverson or Kobe? or Michael Jordan or this person?” Mac says. “What I really wanted to do is just transform inner city kids all around the world to start having a conversation like, ‘What’s a better company, Microsoft or Apple? Do you like Netflix or Facebook?'”

Having those types of conversations can help “make financial literacy more digestible and accessible,” he says. 

Mac thought of the spaces in his community like the barbershop where friends and neighbors debated sports or shared advice on relationships in a comfortable, welcoming environment. He believed getting people to shift some of those conversations to financial topics could help make investing and money management less intimidating.

From spitting bars to signing brand partnerships

Mac’s music and Maconomics call-in style videos on Instagram and YouTube struck a chord. Viewers poured in and Mac amassed a big enough following to capture brands’ attention. Today, his YouTube channel has over 10,000 subscribers.

Revolt TV, a media network founded by Sean “Diddy” Combs, reached out to develop a content partnership. At first, the company just wanted to repost Mac’s videos, but it grew into Mac hosting his Maconomics show on the network in 2019. 

Though Mac already recognized the financial education gap between Black and white Americans, the murder of George Floyd and equal rights demonstrations in 2020 made his mission ever more important. 

“When it comes to the Black Lives Matter movement, it saddens me to think we are having the same fight and protests that our ancestors were having,” Mac says. “In a capitalist society, those without capital tend not to have power. I want to focus on liberating my community by giving them the knowledge and exposure to gain wealth.”

Mac adopted the slogan “Black wealth matters” to bring attention to the idea that economic empowerment is a major step toward equality for Black Americans. “Once we start becoming financially free, we can hopefully become politically free,” he says.

Starting them young

Mac continues to produce content for Revolt TV as well TheStreet and BET. He recently starred in the Netflix documentary “Get Smart with Money” alongside other financial pros like Tiffany “The Budgetnista” Aliche. He’s also pursuing his passion for music as a creative outlet and income generator through sync and licensing deals. 

Looking forward to growing his audience — which already includes over 76,000 Instagram followers — Mac wants to expand into content geared toward children to help his followers get started understanding money even younger.

He hopes his own children will be able to learn how to use money and create even better opportunities for themselves than what he had growing up. Thinking about financial literacy like a language, Mac believes early exposure can promote long-term fluency.

“Despite the fact that my children are only 1 and 2 years old, I speak to them about the economy, stocks and credit scores,” Mac says. “I want them to become submerged in the life of finance because it will make them more confident in their financial decisions as they get older.”

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The new equity team will look at training, outreach and other policies across the VA to ensure that all veterans receive benefits they have earned and eliminate disparities based on race, according to VA Secretary Denis McDonough.

“I have acknowledged to you that we have not always kept that promise especially when it comes to delivering care and benefits to Black veterans,” McDonough said at a press conference Thursday. “And we’ve been wrestling with disparities based on race and VA benefits decisions and military discharge status.”

President Joe Biden ordered the creation of equity teams at federal agencies in an executive order issued Feb. 16. The executive order, “Further Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government” is the second from Biden to address discrimination. 

Last year, a Vietnam veteran, Conley F. Monk Jr., sued the VA over racial disparities in how the Department of Veterans Affairs administered veterans’ benefits programs. Monk was diagnosed with PTSD by a psychiatrist in 2011, according to his lawsuit, which was filed in November and alleges that he was improperly denied benefits for nearly 50 years. Monk’s legal team obtained records from the Department of Veterans Affairs showing that between 2001 to 2020, the average denial rate for disability compensation was 29.5% for Black veterans and 24.2% for white veterans. His legal team says that is a statistically significant difference.

McDonough said that one issue that the team would address was the difference in approval rates for claims of post-traumatic stress disorder between Black and white veterans. White veterans have been approved at a higher rate, the secretary said.

Monk was featured in the NBC report, which included an article published on Monday about how the country is still grappling with wide differences in the way in which GI Bill benefits and disability payments were awarded to Black and white veterans beginning in the post-World War II period. The effects of the discrimination are still felt today in the wealth gap between Black and white Americans especially, according to historians such as Richard Rothstein, a former New York Times education columnist who wrote, “The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.” 

The VA has not been able to say how many Black veterans were victims of discrimination by the department. 

Asked how it would right a wrong if it did not know how many veterans were affected, McDonough said the equity team would work to implement procedural, policy, and structural changes to ensure discrimination did not continue to happen.  

After World War II, Black veterans especially in the South were excluded from educational benefits under the GI Bill. All-white colleges and universities refused to admit them and they were directed to a small number of underfunded Historically Black Colleges and Universities, or industrial and vocational schools, according to a 2002 working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, “Closing the Gap or Widening the Divide: The Effects of the GI Bill and World War II on the Educational Outcomes of Black Americans.” 

Other veterans reported never hearing back from local VA offices or learning that their paperwork had been lost. Only 6% of African American veterans of World War II earned a college degree compared to 19% of white veterans, according to the GI Bill Restoration Act, a bill that would award those lost benefits to their descendants. 

As far as post-World War II housing benefits, federal policies explicitly denied loans to housing developments that sold homes to African Americans. 

The day after the NBC reporting appeared, Democratic Reps. James Clyburn of South Carolina and Seth Moulton re-introduced the GI Bill Restoration Act in the House. 

McDonough said media coverage from media outlets helped bring the issue to the forefront.

“I commend the role that [the media is] doing giving a voice to veterans and holding us to account,” he said. 

McDonough said the equity committee would build on work already being done by the VA on inclusion, diversity and equity. It will be created in the coming days. 

“The bottom line is this: We won’t rest until every veteran gets the world-class care and benefits that they have earned,” he said. 

You can watch our series of investigative reports here: NBC News Now National, and NBC News Local Stations Bay Area, San Diego, Philadelphia, Connecticut, and Washington D.C.

The move came a day after NBC published an article about how the country is still grappling with how to right a wrong that lifted many more white veterans into the middle class while exacerbating the wealth gap with which Black Americans still struggle.

The article was accompanied by a national report that streamed on NBC News Now and by broadcast reports that appeared on five NBC local stations.

Democratic Reps. James Clyburn of South Carolina and Seth Moulton re-introduced the the GI Bill Restoration Act in the House.

Read the original article here.

The BoykinZ have taken the country world by storm with viral videos showing them covering country music hits and sharing dances highlighting their fun, unique personalities. The sisters write, sing, and arrange music with a signature sound they describe as country infusion. It’s country music infused with pop, rock, hip-hop, and soul.

From the suburbs of Atlanta, Kylan, Anale, Nytere, and Alona have gone from performing musical theater together at their family’s performing arts center, to making national headlines after country music star Shania Twain surprised them with a Nashville invitation on “The Kelly Clarkson Show.”

Best known as the Black girls of country TikTok, they currently have over 64 million views, nearly half-a-million followers and more than 10 million likes growing daily.

“We are country music, and just to be able to be ourselves and to express ourselves. This is because it feels like freedom to do what we love together and what we call country infusion; just expressing ourselves to the fullest, even in music, we think is very important,” said Kylan. “And I think it can help set other people free because there are people who want you to stick to whatever stereotypes but we don’t do that. We live our lives and we want to encourage others to do the same.”

“Yes, it also felt like a superpower because we are being inspirational to other folks who go for their dreams. It doesn’t matter what color you are,” Nytere said.

Although they are coworkers, they are sisters who argue like normal. And with that dynamic, they have a natural system that works for them.

“I guess, as sisters, we have arguments. This is a democracy, we usually vote on things that we don’t agree on. So the majority rules,” said Kylan.

“It’s like that bond, and no one else could get like the creativity we understand each other’s creativity,” said Nytere.

“My sisters, they never limit me,” said Alona. “And so we’re limitless. And so when we come together; we’re very powerful.”

As they step into the next phase of their journey from singing covers to publishing their original song, “Girls Night,” they perform and line dance across the country. The BoykinZ are not only vocalists, they also play instruments and have written original music to perform.

The girls credit their success to their parents who are entrepreneurs and quit their jobs to manage their careers after recognizing the girls’ talent.

“Ten years ago, our parents formed us as a group. They had a performing art, performing after-school program. And we were basically born into the arts. And they saw a great opportunity and saw that we could sing and harmonize. They closed their business and they put all their attention on us. Fast forward to now, you know, it’s just been such a blessing,” said Anale.

As young rising country music stars, the sisters hope to inspire people with their talent and music. Their goal is to get people listening to their lyrics to forget about their troubles.

“It’s a blessing. You know, we thank God for these gifts that we get to share them and inspire. And just to walk in our purpose. It just means everything else will have an amazing support system,” Anale said. “Our parents are the bomb dot com, praise God for them.”

They have also performed at Usher’s New Look Foundation Ball and made special appearances at the 2022 Stagecoach Festival, LA Football Club with Kevin Frazier of “Entertainment Tonight,” The National Museum for African American Music, Shaquille O’Neal’s Boys & Girls Club, and recently performed during the presentation of the Bill Pickett Rodeo at Cowtown Coliseum in Fort Worth.

Wells, who was representing the Alpha Suffrage Club, the first Black suffrage club in Chicago that she had founded two months before, wasn’t having it.

“Either I go with you or not at all,” said Wells, also a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. “I am not taking this stand because I personally wish for recognition. I am doing it for the future benefit of my whole race.”

Wells ignored the directive from leading suffragist Alice Paul, waited until the parade began and joined the all-white Chicago delegation as it marched by.

“She believed in herself and had visions of how things could be that other people didn’t see,” Michelle Duster, Wells’ great-granddaughter said. “What inspires me is her level of conviction in herself and her own sense of self.”

Wells and thousands of other African American women fought fiercely for the passage the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote, but they did not gain the same benefit as white women after its ratification on Aug. 18, 1920.

They did however lay the groundwork for African American women like Stacey Abrams, Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Michelle Obama, who continue to battle voter suppression today. And they paved the way for Vice President Kamala Harris, the first Black and Indian American woman to hold the position.

Wells, born into slavery during the Civil War and legendary for her pioneering investigative reporting and anti-lynching activism in the South, was an outspoken advocate throughout her life for Black women’s right to vote — a fight that did not end in 1920.

Like the suffrage parade of 1913, the 19th Amendment was tainted by racism, and its legacy is more complicated than what core history classes teach. For decades afterward, many Black women were kept from the polls through physical violence and intimidation. Poll taxes, literacy tests, and other practices common in Southern states were not prohibited in federal elections until the mid-1960s with the 24th Amendment and the Voting Rights Act.

As the country celebrates Black History Month, the legacy of women such as Wells is especially relevant. Black women and others are fighting restrictions that many charge are nothing but new ways to prevent people of color from voting, among them requirements for voter IDs, the purging of voter rolls and the closing of polling places.

“Well, we know that they are deployed strategically and unevenly to disproportionately keep women and people of color from the polls,” said Martha Jones, professor of history at Johns Hopkins University who calls the story of the 19th Amendment the story of voter suppression.

A century after the ratification of the 19th Amendment, these new laws are mimicking ones in place then, she said.

African American Women Suffrage Pioneers

Black women were among the pioneers in the women’s rights movement, said Jones, the author of “Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All.” Maria Miller Stewart, for example, in 1832 became the first American woman, Black or white, to give a public speech about abolitionism and women’s rights to a group of men and women in Boston.

“Long before women’s conventions became regular occasions, Stewart broke that barrier,” Jones wrote.

But when Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the giants of the suffrage movement, wrote the “History of Woman Suffrage” in the 1880s, they focused on white women activists and largely ignored the contributions of many Black women who worked as abolitionists, attended suffrage meetings, organized suffrage clubs and promoted women’s rights in the U.S.

The late African American historian Rosalyn Terborg-Penn challenged that narrative in her field-defining book in 1998. In “African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850-1920,” she identified more than 120 Black women and wrote about “hundreds of nameless black women” who fought for voting rights but who did not receive the recognition they earned.

The first known African American suffragist and among the most famous was Sojourner Truth. In 1851 she gave a speech at the national women’s rights convention in Akron, Ohio, even though some white women tried to stop her. After the Civil War, she attended meetings of the American Equal Rights Association where she called for the vote for both Black men and for women.

Sarah Remond and her brother Charles came from a noted abolitionist family, and in 1858 gave pro-suffrage speeches at the National Woman’s Rights Convention in New York City, according to Terborg-Penn. Sisters Margaretta Forten and Harriet Forten Purvis helped to establish the interracial Philadelphia Suffrage Association in 1866 and were active in the American Equal Rights Association.

The Rift In The Suffrage Movement

After the Civil War ended in 1865, the women’s rights movement splintered over the issue of voting rights for Black men. Upper-middle-class white women wanted the same rights as white men but Black women saw the right to vote as protection against racial oppression for all Black people. Truth and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, poet and anti-slavery lecturer, urged white suffragists to resist divisions within the movement.

They were “visionaries because they’re the ones who said these divisions just don’t hold, they don’t work. Why? Because Black women are both women and they are Black,” Jones said.

In her address at the Eleventh National Women’s Rights Convention in New York City in 1866, Harper said, “We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity, and society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members without receiving the curse in its own soul. You tried that in the case of the Negro. You pressed him down for two centuries; and in so doing you crippled the moral strength and paralyzed the spiritual energies of the white men of the country.”

Truth and Harper did not succeed. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony severed ties from the American Equal Rights Association and formed the National Woman Suffrage Association, insisting that Black men should not receive the vote before white women. Lucy Stone and Julia Ward headed the new American Woman Suffrage Association, which supported both Black suffrage and women’s suffrage. Black women continued to be active in both organizations.

In 1870, Black men gained the right to vote when the 15th Amendment was ratified, infuriating white women like Anna Howard Shaw, president of the National Women Suffrage Association. She said at the time, “Never before in the history of the world have men made former slaves the political masters of their former mistresses!”

The two suffrage organizations reconciled in 1890 to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Black women remained committed suffragists but did not wait for white women to address the racism they and their communities faced and created their own organizations.

African American Women Organize

“In the midst of those very fraught politics after the Civil War, Black women see the big picture, they see the long game,” Jones said. “They know where they’re going to end and unfortunately, Stanton and Anthony will give in to anti-Black racism and they will taint their movement forever.”

In 1871, African American activist Mary Ann Shadd Cary and 63 other women, Black and white, tried to vote in Washington, D.C. The women were unsuccessful but they convinced officials to sign documents proving they had tried. Five years later, Cary asked the National Woman Suffrage Association on behalf of 94 Black women that their names be enrolled in the July 4 autograph book as signers of the 1848 Woman’s Declaration of Sentiments, which demanded the immediate enfranchisement of American women, according to Terborg-Penn. Their names were never added. 

Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, a Black journalist from Massachusetts, edited the Woman’s Era, the first newspaper published by and for African American women, where she challenged the opposition to women’s suffrage in Boston, according to Terborg-Penn. She was personally discriminated against when seeking to represent her club at the 1900 convention of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, leading to the virtual segregation of Black and white women’s clubs, according to Terborg-Penn’s research.

In 1896, Wells and other Black women established the National Association for Colored Women (NACW). It was considered to be the first national African American Civil Rights organization and “it swelled to twenty-eight federations and over a thousand clubs and boasted membership that was fifty thousand strong,” historians Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross wrote in their book, “Black Women’s History of the United States.” Black women also fought for female suffrage through clubs created within churches and founded Greek-letter organizations such as the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority in 1908 and Delta Sigma Theta in 1913.

“The NACW helped organize masses of Black suffragists who started voter-education clubs, created and submitted petitions, and volunteered on local campaigns,” Berry and Gross wrote.

Mary Church Terrell served at the first president of the NACW. She was a suffragist who maintained relationships with white suffragists and was a great admirer of Susan B. Anthony, but she did most of her work through NACW, Jones said. Hallie Quinn Brown followed in Turrell’s footsteps as president of NACW and led “Black women into the politics of the post 19th Amendment era,” according to Jones.

1920 is Not The End of the Fight for Vote

The year 1920 marked “the beginning of a new movement for voting rights that Black women along with their male counterparts, have to wage in order to defeat the Jim Crow laws that kept Black women from the polls,” Jones said. “For Black women, the 19th Amendment was not the end of the struggle for voting rights, it marked a new beginning.”

After the passage of the 19th Amendment, some Black women tried to register to vote and were successful and “those successes, even though few in number, inspired fresh efforts to suppress Black voters,” according to Liette Gidlow, associate professor of history at Wayne State University in Detroit, who is working on a new book, “The 19th Amendment and the Politics of Race, 1920 —1970.”

When “disfranchised Black women asked the League of Women Voters and the National Woman’s Party (NWP) to help, the main organizations of former suffragists turned them down,” Gidlow wrote in an article. “NWP head Alice Paul insisted in 1921 that Black women’s disfranchisement was a ‘race issue,’ not a ‘woman’s issue,’ and thus no business of the NWP. The failure of white suffragists at that moment to address the disfranchisement of southern Black women reverberated for decades to come and undercut the efforts of women of both races to make progress on issues of shared concern.”

Black women continued to develop political power in the face of disenfranchisement, racism and sexism. Mary McCleod Bethune founded a school for Black children in Daytona, Florida in 1904 and became one of the most important Black educators, women’s rights leaders and government officials. In 1922, she organized hundreds of women to vote in a mayoral election in Daytona. The night before that election, the Ku Klux Klan marched through the school grounds and she “stood them down,” Gidlow said.

“The next day, she took five hundred African American women to the polls with her in support of a mayoral candidate who was supportive of her agenda to improve educational opportunities for African Americans,” Gidlow said. “She worked as an individual. She worked as a community leader, and she worked as an organizer on a national level to boost voting rights.”

Bethune played a pivotal role in the transition of Black voters from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party during the Great Depression, Gidlow said. In 1936 she became the highest-ranking African American woman in government when President Franklin Roosevelt named her director of Negro Affairs of the National Youth Administration.

The Struggle For Votes And The Civil Rights Movement

Black women fought for voting rights against the backdrop of lynchings, intimidation and sexism. They were instrumental to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s but their contributions were overshadowed by well-known African American male leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Medgar Evers. Black women such as Septima Clark, Pauli Murray, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, Dorothy Heights and countless others played more than incidental roles; they were key organizers and activists.

Septima Clark was a member of the NAACP and a teacher who became director of education for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In the 1950s she advocated for the integration of public schools, activism that affected her career, Gidlow said. In 1956, after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision desegregated education, Clark lost her teaching job and access to her pension because she did not comply with a South Carolina law that banned members of the NAACP from teaching. Clark designed educational programs to teach African Americans how to read and write so they could register to vote in the South.

Black women of the Civil Rights Movement “didn’t become figures who were as visible as some others, such as Reverend King, but their work was essential,” Gidlow said. “And people within leading civil rights groups and local organizations understood that their work was essential. They had connections into communities that could be mobilized for voting rights…It was their influence, it was the strength of their ties to family members and neighbors and coworkers that inspired people to put themselves at risk in order to advance these causes.”

Murray was a lawyer, civil rights advocate and an Episcopal minister. In 1943 she organized and led the early student sit-ins that desegregated restaurants in Washington, D.C., according to Jones. She worked with Black and white church women to compile the first full chronicle of the Jim Crow laws in the United States.

Baker was a close associate of the Kings, and in 1960, organized the founding meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, “working to cultivate leadership among college students who were already taking leadership roles by working to desegregate lunch counters in the South,” according to Gidlow.

Hamer worked for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and to register voters in Mississippi. In 1963 she was brutally beaten after being jailed for voter education and desegregation efforts when she was returning from a voter education conference, Gidlow said. She went on to help found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which cast itself as an alternative to the white and conservative Democratic Party.

Height was inspired by Bethune to work with the National Council of Negro Women, and in 1957, became its fourth president, serving in that role for 40 years. Under her guidance, the council supported voter registration in the South and provided financial assistance to civil rights activists throughout the country, according to an article published by the National Women’s History Museum. Height, along with other civil rights activists, organized the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963 but she was not asked to speak.

Ida B. Wells’ great-granddaughter thinks her great grandmother would be happy with the progress Black women have made but also see that their job is not finished.

“We’re not only voting, we’re also politicians,” said Duster, who’s working on a book, “Ida B. the Queen. The Extraordinary Life and Legacy of Ida B. Wells.” “…Maybe on some level, she’d be disappointed that three or four generations after her, we’re facing the same struggles that are manifested in a different way. Some of the violence that she’s lived through, involved thousands of people showing up to lynchings. We don’t have these spectacles, but now there are millions of people across the world viewing the killings of Black people by police on social media.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: A version of this article first appeared on August 17, 2020, to commemorate the centenary of the passage of the 19th Amendment.

Snell and her older brother, Harold C. Riley, are two of six siblings from Orangeburg. Riley was a sophomore student at the college in 1968. He would be shot later during the massacre, and survive.

Orangeburg, then, as it does today, had two historically Black colleges and universities: South Carolina State College (today, South Carolina State University) and Claflin University.

“The climate was — very much so — unrest as it relates to African Americans,” Snell said of Orangeburg in 1968, four years after the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed segregation nationwide

In early February 1968, students from both HBCUs organized a sit-in at the snack bar of All Star Bowling Lane, the town’s sole bowling alley and a segregated establishment. The students were turned away and left peacefully.

The following night, a larger group of students returned to the bowling alley, according to an article in The Charlotte Observer. A historian recounts that a window was shattered, near the bowling alley entrance. Police beat students with wooden batons.

South Carolina Gov. Robert McNair called in the National Guard to patrol Orangeburg. 

On the third evening of protests, Feb. 8, 1968, approximately 200 unarmed, mostly Black students joined together on the South Carolina State College campus to protest segregation.

Snell, who was 11 years old at the time, did not know where Riley was that evening.

“I was in the eighth grade,” she recalled. “My parents had sent [one of my] older brothers to pick me up from school. … The [Orangeburg] curfews started on massacre day and when my brother came to pick me up and I asked why, he said, ‘Mom and Dad said because of the unrest, they didn’t want us walking on the street and [wanted us] home by 6 p.m.’” 

Back on the campus of South Carolina State College, student protestors built a bonfire to stay warm, and sang. The campus was put on lockdown, and a small army of National Guardsmen and State Police officers surrounded the campus.

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Riley didn’t get to campus until that evening, but he noticed something was different — the presence of National Guardsmen and vehicles amidst the protesters. Riley was on campus for only a few minutes when he heard a sound.

“They blew a whistle … that whistle sounded funny to me,” he said. “They started shooting them down, the shotguns — Boom. Boom. Booom. Booom.”

Riley leapt behind a trash can as bullets whizzed past him: “Bing. Bong. Bing. Bong.” He was partially exposed to gunfire and was hit on his leg and left hip.

“[A] man blew a whistle,” Riley remembered, “and they stopped shooting.”

The Orangeburg Massacre took less than 10 seconds: Unarmed, college-age Black women and men, and at least one high school student, shot at by state troopers.

Three Black students were killed. Their names are Henry Smith, a Black student at South Carolina State College; Samuel Hammond Jr., a Black student at South Carolina State College; and Delano Middleton, a Black high school student at Orangeburg High School, whose mother worked at South Carolina State College.

Riley was close with both Smith, whom he calls “Smitty,” and Hammond Jr., whom he calls “Sam.” Sam spent the last day of his life with Riley, off campus.

“My mother fixed a real nice dinner for us,” Riley remembered.

After the massacre, Riley found Sam in the campus infirmary, covered in “red spots all over his body, head to toe.”

Riley witnessed Smitty beaten with the back of a gun “until they kill[ed] him.”

After the shooting stopped, Riley said, it was horror.

“I got up and must have stepped over a million people, people hollering and crying,” he said. “I was running, I was running.”

Riley didn’t realize that he, himself, had been shot twice until he saw blood on his right leg. When he stood up, he felt like he had “a pocketbook on [his] backside.” Riley has no memory of anyone coming to campus to investigate, to see if anyone needed help, or to transport him or any other victims to the hospital.

When Riley’s mother took him to the doctor, the bullet in his buttocks would be removed successfully, but the bullet in his leg could not be removed.

 “I said, that’s a very good idea, because if I ever need some evidence … it’s right in my right knee,” Riley said. When he got an X-ray a few years ago, he still saw “that little spot,” as long as the “end of your little finger.”

He points out that many people, himself included, never reported their gunshot wounds. Official accounts report that 27 people were wounded, but Riley believes the number is higher.

“You can’t … put no jelly on it, no mayonnaise on it, it is what it is,” he said. “A massacre.”

Governor McNair blamed “Black power advocates” for the “violence” of the massacre. In December 1968, nearly one year after the massacre, nine officers were charged with “imposing summary punishment without due process of law.” No evidence was presented to demonstrate whether any of the protestors were armed, and a federal jury acquitted the officers after a two-hour deliberation.

Cleveland Sellers, a friend of Riley’s then and to this day, was one of the South Carolina State College students protesting segregated facilities the night of the massacre. Sellers had also been a national program director with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He was convicted of rioting and jailed for seven months. Sellers was pardoned by the State of South Carolina 25 years later. 

Riley reflects on his own struggle to process his experience.

“It’s right next to Martin Luther King dying,” he said. “You can’t push it aside because you wish you could say it didn’t happen. What would South Carolina State be today? Would I have finished? I don’t know.”

While at South Carolina State College, Riley played football — a halfback — and pursued a major in physical education and a minor in biology.

After the massacre, Riley moved to North Carolina and finished college at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. At A&T, he continued studying physical education and biology, earning his bachelor’s degree. He continued playing football, as well.

After graduating, he stayed in North Carolina and established his life in Greensboro, where he still lives today with his wife. Riley shared that many other students also left South Carolina State after the night of the massacre.

Riley became an expert interior and drywall specialist, a trade he learned from his father. He did not pursue a professional football career and feels good about the decision, noting football would not have been “a long-term position” for him, and that he stayed in the interior design industry for about 40 years.

He has been semi-retired for nine years. His wife, an educator, has been retired for 19. They have two children, both educators.

“My kids are very sweet,” Riley says.

Both children received scholarships while they were in college.

Riley thinks that his 8-year-old grandson might be interested in learning how to bowl, describing Landen as someone who is “very versatile, loves sports … [and] is very smart — I really appreciate him.” Riley sees him about every other week.

Riley adds that every time he sees his kids, he wonders about the family his friends could have had: “I wonder how much … they took from them. I’m a grandparent now … but they will never see that.”

“I kind of … promised Smith’s mother that I would find an end to this thing. And, 50-something years later, ain’t much movement. … They seem like they’re trying to forget about us. … I’m 75 years old.”

No one has reached out to Riley about the Orangeburg Massacre in over 50 years, since Jet Magazine met with him in the late 1960s and photographed his injuries.

When asked if there was anything else he would like to share, Riley said he’d like to talk to a member of the National Guard that was at the protest.

It would be “good to hear from somebody else on the other side,” he said. “I know my side, and my side ain’t gonna change.

“I often see myself walking up [to] Columbia [South Carolina’s state capital] … with my pretty suit on and shiny shoes and testify. How long [has] that been? Over 50 years.”

Riley says he will go back to Orangeburg one more time — in February 2023 — “and that will be my last.”

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Built 25 years before the American Revolution, the original structure stood near the college campus of William & Mary. The pinewood building held as many as 30 students at a time, some of them free Black children studying alongside the enslaved.

Hundreds of people lined the streets to celebrate its slow-speed trip into the heart of the living history museum, which tells the story of Virginia’s colonial capital through interpreters and restored buildings.

For historians and descendants alike, the Bray School contradicts the belief that all enslaved Americans were uneducated. But the school’s faith-based curriculum – created by an English charity – also justified slavery and encouraged students to accept their fate as God’s plan.

“Religion was at the heart of the school, and it was not a gospel of abolition,” said Maureen Elgersman Lee, director of William & Mary’s Bray School Lab.

“There was this need to proselytize and to bring salvation while still not doing anything to destabilize the institution of slavery,” Lee said. “Save the soul, but continue to enslave the body. It was the here versus the hereafter.”

It was a brand of duplicity that fit easily into the larger contradictions of the country’s founding, when the Democracy being forged explicitly denied rights and freedoms to many of its people.

Williamsburg is less than 10 miles from Jamestown, which England established in 1607. The colony was supplied with enslaved Africans for labor just a dozen years later. A century and half after that, Black people, most of them still enslaved, represented just over half of Williamsburg’s 2,000 people.

The Bray School was established in 1760 at the recommendation of Benjamin Franklin, chairman of a London-based Anglican charity named after philanthropist Reverend Thomas Bray. The charity also set up schools in other cities, including New York and Philadelphia.

The curriculum ranged from spellers to the Book of Common Prayer. But even within the schools’ paternalistic framework, the education could still be empowering, perhaps even subversive.

“I was going through a facsimile of one of the books, and there are words like ‘liberty,’” Lee said. “What did learning those words do to expand these children’s sense of themselves? Their sense of the world?”

Isaac Bee, a Bray School student, would run away as an adult from a slave owner named Lewis Burwell. An ad that Burwell placed in The Virginia Gazette in 1774 offered a cash bounty for his return and warned that Bee could read.

The white teacher, a widow named Ann Wagner, lived upstairs at the school, and taught an estimated 300 to 400 students, whose ages ranged from 3 to 10, according to surviving records.

The Williamsburg Bray School operated until 1774; only Philadelphia’s reopened after the Revolutionary War. The structure became a private home for many years before it was incorporated into William & Mary’s campus.

The former schoolhouse eventually was moved from its original spot to make way for a dormitory. The original structure had 1.5 stories, with a small upstairs. It was expanded over the years to include two full stories, and was last used as an office for ROTC, the college program that prepares military officers.

Historians believed they had identified the original Bray School building, but it wasn’t confirmed until 2021, through the use of dendrochronology, a scientific method that examines tree rings in lumber to determine the wood’s harvest date.

“This is a remarkable story of survival,” said Matthew Webster, Colonial Williamsburg’s executive director of architectural preservation and research. “And for us, it’s so important to put it back (to its original state) and tell the full and true story.”

The Bray School was exceptional: Although Virginia waited until the 1800s to impose anti-literacy laws, white leaders across much of Colonial America forbid educating enslaved people, fearing literacy would encourage their liberty. South Carolina criminalized teaching slaves to write English in 1740.

Inside the schoolhouse, the original post at the bottom of the walnut staircase still stands, its square top rounded and nicked from centuries of use, Webster said, adding that it’s a “very powerful piece for a lot of people.”

For Tonia Merideth, the Bray School Lab’s oral historian, the building stirred up many emotions upon her first visit. It was material proof against the narrative that her ancestors were illiterate and dumb.

“Everything that I learned about my ancestors was wrong,” she said. “They could learn. They did learn. They were able.”

Merideth added: “Regardless of the intentions of the school, the children were still taking that education and possibly serving it for their own good and aiding in their community.”

Merideth can trace her roots to the Armistead family, which enslaved people in the Williamsburg area and is known to have sent at least one child, named Locust, to the Bray School. But only three years of student lists have survived.

The moving of the Bray School is part of Colonial Williamsburg’s ongoing reckoning over its past storytelling of Black history and the nation’s origin story. The museum was founded in 1926 but did not tell Black stories until 1979.

In 2021, it uncovered the brick foundation of one of the nation’s oldest Black churches. Last year, archeologists began to excavate graves at the site.

The Bray School’s new location is right next door.

“We’re going back and we’re getting that school and we’re getting that legacy,” Merideth said. “And we’re bringing it back to the historic area.”

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Tokley, a public relations manager, had always made a point of sharing with her children their family history as well as accounts of Black life from bygone eras. “But this deliberate attempt to erase our past, as if it did not happen or is not important — when, in fact, is a critical part of telling America’s story — is really disgusting,” she said. “At the same time, DeSantis doesn’t understand what he’s doing. He is provoking Black parents to take the reins to educate their children on our history and relate it to what’s going on in the world today … And we are.”

With DeSantis leading the charge, Florida rejected a proposed Advanced Placement African American studies course because it discussed the topics of reparations, Black feminism and the Movement for Black Lives, among others, according to a list of concerns DeSantis’ office shared. On Jan. 12, the Florida Department of Education sent a letter to the College Board, which administers the class for high school students nationwide, informing them the course will not be offered in public schools across the state.

As for DeSantis, the Republican governor has said the proposed AP course “lacks educational value.”

Many parents told NBC News that their disappointment and anger have shifted to a dogged determination to counter the bans by taking command of their children’s Black history education and using racially charged events as teaching platforms.

Read the full story on NBCNews.com

From its early roots to modern day recognition, here’s what you need to know about celebrating Black History month:

The History of Black History Month

Carter G. Woodson was an early scholar of African American history. Dubbed “the father of Black history,” he founded the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH). He launched The Journal of African American History, the association’s scholarly publication, in 1916 — half a century after the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in the U.S.

Woodson was determined to dedicate time to celebrating the historic contributions of Black people, leading him to establish Negro History Week in February 1926.

Over the years, mayors of cities across the nation also began recognizing Negro History Week. By the late 1960s, catalyzed by the Civil Rights movement and efforts to transform race relations, Negro History Week evolved into Black History Month for many schools and communities.

In 1976, President Gerald Ford officially recognized Black History Month as a national observance, encouraging Americans to “seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of Black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.”

Why Do We Celebrate Black History Month in February?

February is the birth month of two prominent figures who contributed to the freedom of enslaved African Americans. 

President Abraham Lincoln, born on Feb. 12, issued the Emancipation Proclamation during the third year of the Civil War, which declared enslaved people living within the rebellious states free and linked the issue of slavery directly to the war.

Frederick Douglass was born enslaved and later became a leader in the abolitionist movement. His date of birth was not recorded, but he celebrated his birthday on Feb. 14.

Woodson chose the second week of February for Negro History Week to honor their birthdays and legacies.

Since 1976, every U.S. president after Ford has officially designated February as Black History Month.

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What’s This Year’s Theme for Black History Month?

Black History Month has a different theme every year.

Woodson believed providing a theme was essential to focus the public’s attention. The ASALH said it selects themes that “reflect changes in how people of African descent in the United States have viewed themselves, the influence of social movements on racial ideologies, and the aspirations of the Black community.”

The theme of this year’s Black History Month is Black Resistance.

“Black resistance strategies have served as a model for every other social movement in the country, thus, the legacy and importance of these actions cannot be understated,” the ASALH’s website states.

How to Celebrate Black History Month

There are various ways to celebrate the month and educate yourself on Black history.

Here are just a few ideas to get you started:

Watch a movie

Still haven’t seen “Wakanda Forever” or “Woman King?” AMC Theaters is offering $5 movie tickets to watch films from Black actors and filmmakers.

If you prefer watching movies from home, here is a list of more films available on Netflix, Amazon Prime and other popular streaming services.

Support Black-owned businesses and artists

Many top shopping sites like Amazon, Yelp and Door Dash allow you to filter for Black-owned businesses and restaurants. Try it out next time you place an online order.

Find online celebrations

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture is providing free online programming this month. You can view the full calendar here.

Attend local events

Check your city and state government websites for Black History Month events like art and music workshops, film screenings and more.

More options include researching Black history in your community and reading Black literature.

The list of 35 grantees includes 16th Street Baptist Church Inc. in Birmingham, Alabama, where crucial civil rights organizing meetings were held during Jim Crow segregation in the 1960s and where four Black girls were killed after a bombing by members of the Ku Klux Klan in 1963.

Black churches in nearly every region of the U.S. are among the fund’s first round of recipients receiving grants ranging from $50,000 to $200,000.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund launched its “Preserving Black Churches” program in 2021 to help support ongoing or planned restoration work in historic congregations that are caretakers of cultural artifacts and bear monumental legacies. Some church renovations were imperiled or severely postponed three years ago after the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, which reduced the capacity of many houses of worship to serve the public at an unprecedented time of need.

“Leaving an indelible imprint on our society, historic Black churches hold an endearing legacy of community, spirituality and freedom that continues to span generations,” said Brent Leggs, the fund’s executive director, who is also senior vice president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

The Rev. Monica Marshall couldn’t agree with that sentiment more. She was a teenager in the 1970s when she became a member of Varick Memorial African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. It is the oldest continuous Black congregation in the borough and has been ministering in the community for more than 200 years.

Marshall, 66, has fond memories of joining the church’s youth choir, playing the keyboard and leading its music ministry, before accepting the call to preach many years later. In 2010, she became the pastor. There are about 75 active members.

Varick Memorial’s current building dates back to 1951, but is deteriorating and has roofing issues. The church has been mostly uninhabitable since 2020, the reverend said.

“The pandemic made it harder to maintain the building,” Marshall said. “I just heard God tell me, ‘You’re not going back into the same building that you came out of.’ The people have been very faithful, they’ve been waiting on my vision and it just came true.”

The congregation received a grant of $200,000 to support critical restoration of the building’s structural integrity. Marshall said the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund’s efforts have restored hope that Varick Memorial can resume a wider array of services to the community.

“If you don’t know where you’ve come from, it’s hard to press on and go to even greater heights, to deeper depths in your life and in your legacy,” the reverend said.

Many Black churches, both historic and modern, experience challenges related to deferred renovation, insufficient funds for regular maintenance and threats of demolition due to public hazards.

Since before the abolition of slavery, the Black church has been an epicenter for the cultural, social and educational pursuits of its members. The church has also played a role in brokering congregants’ relationship to political power. It’s not uncommon for politicians, most often Democrats, to campaign from Black church pulpits.

The church is a domain for the prophetic tradition in which preachers weave Scripture with criticisms of racism, corruption and poverty. “Souls to the polls” is a get-out-the-vote campaign common in the Black church, encouraging congregants to take advantage of early voting periods to counteract voter suppression and intimidation.

“After all, these are our sacred sites, which our ancestors built from the ground up, and we must do everything we can to ensure their survival,” said Henry Louis Gates Jr., the professor and historian who sits on the action fund’s national advisory council.

In 2021, Gates executive produced and hosted a four-hour docuseries for PBS called “The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song,” based on his New York Times bestselling book of the same title.

“Preserving these structures is a visible way of preserving a crucial chapter of Black history,” Gates said.

The action fund’s other grantees include First Bryan Baptist Church in Savannah, Georgia, which is considered to be one of the oldest Black Baptist churches in the U.S.; Cory United Methodist Church in Cleveland, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X spoke in 1963 and 1964; and St. Paul Christian Methodist Episcopal, a church located on the historically Black campus of Lane College in Jackson, Tennessee.

The action fund’s administrators said they received proposals for 1,266 Black churches across the U.S., with $189 million in total funds requested. The effort is supported by a $20 million seed donation received last year from the Lilly Endowment Inc., which supports religious, educational and charitable causes.

St. Rita Catholic Church in Indianapolis, another action fund grantee, will receive $100,000 to fix its bell tower and repair the main structure’s masonry, which date back to 1958.

“The bricks of the bell tower started falling off about 19 years ago,” said the Rev. Jean Bosco Ntawugashira, who was appointed pastor of the congregation last July. “It became a danger to the community and, unfortunately because of COVID, the (restoration) project was somehow halted.”

St. Rita has been serving Indianapolis’ Black residents since 1919 and is considered the city’s mother church for Black Catholics from all over the world.

“The Black community, some time back, considered the Catholic Church to be the church for the whites,” Ntawugashira said. “They are going to understand that the Catholic Church is universal and it doesn’t close doors to anyone. They belong to a global community.”

Snowden-McCray, a journalist who worked at the city’s major daily, the Sun, and the now-shuttered alternative weekly, the Baltimore City Paper, knew Holofcener, a lawyer-activist who represented artists, from the progressive orbit they both inhabited.

She and Brandon Soderberg, a former Baltimore City paper editor, had tried to launch a new paper, the Baltimore Beat, but the publishing company that supported it pulled the plug. In 2020, Holofcener casually asked the two if they had any plans to resuscitate the publication.

After some more conversation, he surprised the two with an offer. The foundation, which he says had been making a “hodge-podge” of unfocused grants for decades, would essentially go out of business after giving the Beat $1 million.

“I knew he was a nice guy,” Snowden-McCray says. “I didn’t know he had access to a million dollars. The money was a complete shock to me.”

His family’s Lillian Holofcener Charitable Foundation joins a growing number of grantmakers that have put time limits on their existence so they can direct more money immediately to charities.

Not only did the Holofcener foundation decide to give away just about every cent it had but Adam Holofcener, 36, and the other relatives on the board did something even more rare by dedicating almost all of its remaining assets to a single project.

For Holofcener, the bold move was both an attempt to directly respond to the calls for racial justice after the murder of George Floyd by police in 2020 and an attempt to purge the family of gains it had made, which, as Holofcener sees it, came at the expense of Baltimore’s Black residents.

Holofcener’s grandfather amassed his wealth first through his insurance businesses and then through a successful chain of skiing and golfing equipment stores. Decades ago, the Holofceners left Baltimore for the suburbs, like thousands of other white families, leaving the city with a depleted tax base.

The large grant is an attempt to counter the idea that “any giving is good giving,” Holofcener says. A better way to give, he says, was for the foundation to give up control of how the money was used and leave those decisions to the Baltimore Beat staff.

“It was very important that not only were we giving all the money away but that we were losing the money,” he says. “It’s as important to disempower ourselves as it is to empower them.”

In 2020, Holofcener wasn’t even in a position to decide how to spend the family’s remaining philanthropic assets. The sole board member, his uncle Rick, a serial entrepreneur, was halfway around the world, living with his family in Thailand. Adam brought up the idea with his sister Ashley, who lives in Florida, and with Rick’s daughter Sydney, who lives in Tennessee.

Ashley says those discussions encouraged her to make a big bet.

“Why can’t we strike while the iron is hot,” she says her family members told her. “There’s a real opportunity for us to engage.”

The problem was that none of the cousins actually had any say over how the family foundation doled out money. Rick had accepted that job years before, but he was not a hands-on philanthropist.

“I was not in that business,” he says.

The younger Holofceners found that their uncle was receptive to having them join the board. Upon joining, Adam wanted to push the family to take chances. He introduced them to a book, “Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance,” by Edgar Villanueva, that advocates that philanthropists respond to the needs of grantees rather than dictate how they operate.

The reading, Rick says, was useful. Coming from a business background, the idea that a nonprofit could get a lump sum with no strings attached seemed counterintuitive. Steering the Holofceners’ limited remaining assets toward a single nonprofit, rather than a group of organizations, seemed to go against the grain of basic business advice: Spread your resources out in a portfolio of investments.

“It was a little bit scary for me,” Rick Holofcener says.

They did consider another option: creating a community-led fund that would have spread out grants to a number of nonprofits each year. But by making a single, eyebrow-raising grant, the Holofceners thought they might draw the attention of other donors and encourage them to give. The Beat reports that it has raised an additional $250,000 since the Holofcener gift.

Coming to the decision meant the Holofceners had to reorient their notion of success, Ashley says. She hopes the Baltimore Beat publishes for many years to come. But if it doesn’t, the grant will have accomplished something important if it spurs other foundations to act boldly.

“A win in our minds is breaking the cycle of how foundations and philanthropic organizations are typically managed today,” she says.

More family foundations are considering whether to give more — or even all — of their assets, says Nicholas Tedesco, president of the National Center for Family Philanthropy.

As new generations of family members increasingly populate foundation boards, Tedesco predicts more grantmakers will begin to take a second look at how they give. Typically, he says, people who make a lot of money view it as a hard-earned asset and might resist giving up control over how charities use their grants. Their sons and daughters, however, are more likely to see their family’s money as a gift to pass along to others.

“Among the next generation of family philanthropy, we see more of a willingness to embrace risk and to move away from a posture of waiting for guaranteed results,” he says.

In a letter from the editor published in the relaunched Beat’s inaugural edition in August, Snowden-McCray outlined the paper’s goals.

“We wanted to give Black writers the opportunities to tell their own stories,” she wrote. “We wanted to help add depth to the stories that are told about Baltimore. We wanted to make a paper that reflected the joys — the art created here, the celebrations held here, the lives lived here — and sadness of the city.”

But before the Holofceners agreed to cede control over their assets and help Snowden-McCray with her mission, they wanted a sense of confidence that the paper would be managed well, say both the family members and Snowden-McCray

Working for several months with Snowden-McCray and Soderberg, the paper’s co-founder, the family and the journalists fine-tuned their vision. The process, Soderberg says, was stress-free because they knew the money was coming; the time-out was simply to make sure the nonprofit paper would have a smooth rollout.

The foundation wasn’t laying out preconditions or must-dos. Instead, the pause gave the paper and the family time to thoroughly nail down their plans.

The paper developed a comprehensive strategy for where it should deploy newspaper boxes so they would reach people who would benefit the most.

To keep operating costs in line, the refined business plan also called for a biweekly paper instead of a weekly, as originally planned. As a result of the extended planning, Snowden-McCray is optimistic about the paper’s future.

“Everybody wants everything fast,” she says. “But I think slow cooking it will ultimately help us last.”

_____

This article was provided to The Associated Press by the Chronicle of Philanthropy. Alex Daniels is a senior reporter at the Chronicle. The AP and the Chronicle receive support from the Lilly Endowment for coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

Gospel songwriter and producer Sir the Baptist had come to Nashville in October 2021 to hear Tennessee State University’s Aristocrat of Bands perform during homecoming at the invitation of assistant band director Larry Jenkins.

Baptist “fell in love with the band” at the historically Black university. Later that night, over tacos and pollo enquesado, the two preachers’ kids bonded as they discussed a collaboration.

“I was fighting for gospel, and he was fighting for marching band. Right?” Baptist recalled in an interview. “And what all HBCUs have in common is this connection to their roots, which is gospel, right?

“We said, ‘OK. You know what? This is an essential for our culture. Let’s do it.’”

The record’s nomination for best roots gospel album marks the first time a college marching band has been nominated in that category. It is especially significant that the honor goes to an HBCU — a historically Black college or university — where marching bands are often an essential part of the schools’ identities and culture.

Tammy Kernodle, a distinguished professor of music at Miami University who specializes in African American music, understands the importance of marching bands at HBCUs from personal experience.

At Virginia State University, an HBCU where she earned her undergraduate degree, the marching band was “the epicenter of student life, especially during football season,” she said. “You went to the game not so much to see the football team as to see the band,” and the halftime show was “the moment where everything stopped.”

Even when there weren’t games, the drumline or horn sections practicing in the evenings formed the soundscape of university life, Kernodle said.

In the culture at large, often HBCU bands are thought of primarily for “the pageantry, the high-stepping style, the dance style,” Kernodle said. But this album “reminds us that a major part of that aesthetic, and what helps define the essence and the uniqueness of that aesthetic, is what these bands play — the musicianship, the range of repertory that they mine, and how they bring a full scope of Black music history to those performances.”

While the instrumental musicians on the album are from TSU, the vocalists include an all-star ensemble of chart-topping gospel singers like Donald Lawrence and Fred Hammond. Together, they perform a range of songs and styles — from a simple instrumental version of “Jesus Loves Me,” to the R&B-inflected “Blessings on Blessings,” to the inspirational pop ballad “Going Going,” with soaring vocals by Kierra Sheard and accompanying melodic rap from TSU alum Dubba-AA.

Some songs are new arrangements of classic hymns. Others were written especially for the album, like “Dance Revival,” which features a foot-stomping, hand-clapping backbeat behind the electrifying voice of Jekalyn Carr. But even that new song finishes with a segue into the old spiritual “Wade in the Water.”

The offerings are so diverse that Baptist, who is himself a voting Grammy member, was concerned the album wouldn’t be accepted in the roots gospel category. Asked how they chose the songs, Baptist and Jenkins said they wanted the album to tell a story about Black history.

“These hymnals brought us from slavery to the White House,” Baptist said, noting that many Black leaders have also been preachers, like the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

“Even to go from a band perspective,” Jenkins added, “in all of our HBCU bands, I promise you, you can go to any game, every HBCU band has a version of ‘I’m So Glad’” — a Christian hymn with the lyrics, “I’m so glad Jesus lifted me.”

“At TSU, we take it a step further. ‘I’m So Glad’ is literally the fight song,” Jenkins said (The lyrics are tweaked to “I’m so glad I go to TSU”). “So many of these things are infused into the culture.”

Appropriately, it’s the song that leads off the album.

The duo also wanted “The Urban Hymnal” to speak to the young students, some of whom are not Christian or were not raised in the gospel tradition.

“I think it’s amazing that we were able to bring rapping to the roots of gospel,” Baptist said. “Because in order to make this more urban, we had to connect it to the students. And if we couldn’t connect it to the students, I don’t think the story would have aligned as perfectly.”

One of those students is 21-year-old senior Logyn Rylander, who said she almost cried when she first heard the album. She loves the way it blends old and new while staying true to the spirit and culture of TSU, where she is a music business major and saxophonist in the Aristocrat of Bands.

“Staying original, staying true to yourself: If I’m being fully honest, that’s what being an Aristocrat is about,” Rylander said. “We don’t ever switch up what we’re doing because we see another school doing it. We always stay true to who we are. And that’s something the album has allowed us to represent on a global scale.”

Rylander hopes for a Grammy win when the awards are announced on Feb. 5 but said she was “ecstatic” just to be nominated along with her fellow musicians.

“Even if we don’t win that Grammy, we know people saw what we can do,” she said. “I look forward to seeing what opportunities come knocking at our door. … Grammy or not, we’re still going to be the Aristocrats at the end of the day.”

Bridges, who was 6 years old when she first walked into William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans, was represented by members of her family Jan. 12 as Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser and others spoke of her family’s courage in the days of vehement opposition to the desegregation.

“She walked these stairs and not only changed the course of integration in this city, but also the course of history. This is never lost on us as a staff and a student body,” Principal Jasmine Graves Black-Clemons said. “We are grateful for her sacrifice.”

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Four Black children integrated New Orleans schools on Nov. 14, 1960 — three girls entered McDonough 19 school that day as Bridges walked into Frantz. Bridges’ walk into the school with federal marshals was immortalized in a famous Norman Rockwell painting.

Nungesser, who as lieutenant governor oversees state tourism, said he took steps to establish a Louisiana Civil Rights Trail after hearing of similar projects in Alabama and Mississippi.

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967)

Starring Sidney Poitier, Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” made major waves upon release as it was one of the first major motion pictures to depict an interracial marriage in a positive light. It came out the same year that the Supreme Court ruled on Loving v. Virginia, which struck down all state laws banning interracial marriage. 

The Wiz (1978)

It’s the all-Black “Wizard of Oz.” Starring Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, Lena Horne, and Richard Pryor, the film follows the adventures of Dorothy, a shy, 24-year-old Harlem schoolteacher who finds herself magically transported to the urban fantasy Land of Oz.

The Color Purple (1985)

Directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Whoopi Goldberg, Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover, the film tells the story of a young Black girl named Celie Harris and details the multitude of problems Black women faced during the early 20th century, including domestic violence, incest, pedophilia, poverty, racism, and sexism. 

Glory (1989)

Starring Denzel Washington, “Glory” is an American historical war drama directed by Edward Zwick about the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, the Union Army’s first Black regiment in the American Civil War.

Do The Right Thing (1989)

An American comedy-drama film produced, written, and directed by Spike Lee, the film stars Lee, Danny Aiello, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Giancarlo Esposito, Bill Nunn, John Turturro and Samuel L. Jackson, and is the feature film debut of Martin Lawrence and Rosie Perez. The story explores a Brooklyn neighborhood’s simmering racial tension, which culminates in tragedy and violence on a hot summer day.

Malcolm X (1992)

Spike Lee would partner with Denzel Washington on multiple projects, but it was their pairing bringing the life of Malcolm X to the screen that would net Washington an Oscar nomination. Washington charts the life of Malcolm X as he journeys from a street hustler to religious leader, political seer and American martyr. 

Remember the Titans (2000)

The biographical sports film stars Denzel Washington and is based on the true story of Black coach Herman Boone and his attempt to integrate the T. C. Williams High School football team in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1971.

The Princess and the Frog (2009)

Set in 1920s New Orleans, the animated Disney film tells the story of a waitress named Tiana who dreams of opening her own restaurant. After kissing a prince who has been turned into a frog by an evil witch doctor, Tiana becomes a frog herself and must find a way to turn back into a human before it is too late. More significantly, the film debuted Tiana as the first Black Disney Princess.

Fruitvale Station (2013)

Starring Michael B. Jordan, the biographical drama was written and directed by Ryan Coogler. It’s based on the events leading to the death of Oscar Grant, a young Black man who was killed in 2009 by police at the Fruitvale district station of the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system in Oakland.

12 Years A Slave (2013)

Starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, filmmaker Steve McQueen adapts the memoir of Solomon Northup, a free Black man who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the American south in 1841.

42 (2013)

Before he donned the mantle of the Black Panther, Chadwick Boseman played real life hero Jackie Robinson in the film “42.” The film depicts the two years in which Robinson broke the sport’s color barrier in Major League Baseball and the abuse he suffered from both fans and teammates along the way.

Lee Daniels’ The Butler (2013)

Loosely based on the real life of Eugene Allen, who worked in the White House for decades, the film stars Forest Whitaker as Cecil Gaines, a Black man who is a witness of notable political and social events of the 20th century during his 34-year tenure serving as a White House butler.

Selma (2014)

“Selma” chronicles the Selma to Montgomery marches led by Civil Rights activists such as Martin Luther King, Jr. The marches, held over a period of 18 days, aimed to secure equal voting rights and were met with violent resistance from local law enforcement. Starring David Oyelowo as Martin Luther King Jr., the film was directed by Ava DuVernay.

Hidden Figures (2016)

Starring Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe, “Hidden Figures” tells the story of three Black women at NASA who serve as the brains behind one of the greatest operations in history: the launch of astronaut John Glenn into orbit.

Loving (2016)

Starring Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton, the film tells the true story of Richard and Mildred Loving whose interracial marriage would end with an historic 1967 Supreme Court decision.

I Am Not Your Negro (2016)

“I Am Not Your Negro” is a documentary film directed by Raoul Peck, based on James Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript “Remember This House.” Narrated by Samuel L. Jackson, the film explores the history of racism in the United States through Baldwin’s reminiscences of civil rights leaders Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr., as well as his personal observations of American history.

Fences (2016)

Starring Denzel Washington and Viola Davis, “Fences” tells the story of Troy Maxson, who makes his living as a sanitation worker in 1950s Pittsburgh. Bitter over his missed opportunities, he creates further tension in his family when he squashes his son’s chance to meet a college football recruiter. The film was adapted from August Wilson’s play “Fences.”

13th (2016)

“13th” is a documentary by Ava DuVernay that explores the intersection of race, justice, and mass incarceration in the United States. It’s titled after the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which abolished slavery throughout the United States and ended involuntary servitude except as a punishment for conviction of a crime.

Moonlight (2016)

Winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture, the film was written and directed by Barry Jenkins and is based on Tarell Alvin McCraney’s unpublished semi-autobiographical play “In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue.” It stars Trevante Rhodes, André Holland, Janelle Monáe, Ashton Sanders, Jharrel Jerome, Naomie Harris, and Mahershala Ali. The film presents three stages in the life of the main character: his childhood, adolescence, and early adult life. It explores the difficulties he faces with his sexuality and identity, including the physical and emotional abuse he endures growing up.

Mudbound (2017)

A historical drama directed by Dee Rees based on the 2008 novel of the same name the film stars Jason Mitchell, Mary J. Blige, Carey Mulligan, Garrett Hedlund, Jason Clarke and Jonathan Banks. It film depicts two World War II veterans – one white, one Black – who return to rural Mississippi each to address racism and PTSD.

Get Out (2017)

Written and directed by Jordan Peele in his directorial debut, the film stars Daniel Kaluuya, Allison Williams, Lil Rel Howery, Bradley Whitford and Catherine Keene. It tells the story of a young Black man who visits his white girlfriend’s parents for the weekend, where his uneasiness about their reception of him eventually reaches a horrific boiling point.

The Black Panther (2018)

As much a cultural touchstone as a film, Chadwick Boseman’s portrayal as the now iconic superhero had much of the country talking upon its release. The film received numerous awards and nominations, with seven nominations at the 91st Academy Awards including Best Picture.

BlacKkKlansman (2018)

Directed by Spike Lee and starring John David Washington, the film is based on the 2014 memoir “Black Klansman” by Ron Stallworth. Set in the 1970s in Colorado Springs, the plot follows the first Black detective in the city’s police department as he sets out to infiltrate and expose the local Ku Klux Klan chapter.

Just Mercy (2019)

The biographical legal drama stars Michael B. Jordan and Jamie Foxx. It tells the true story of Walter McMillian, who, with the help of young defense attorney Bryan Stevenson, appeals his murder conviction. The film is based on the memoir of the same name, written by Stevenson.

When They See Us (2019)

Across a four-episode limited series, director Ava DuVernay tells the story of the “Central Park Five” – a group of Black boys who were falsely accused of raping a white woman in New York’s Central Park in 1989. The film charts the court case and charges that followed, and details the institutional racism that led to their incarceration.

Harriet (2019)

Starring Cynthia Erivo, the film tells the tale of Harriet Tubman’s escape from slavery and transformation into one of America’s greatest heroes, who went on to free hundreds of slaves from captivity.

John Lewis: Good Trouble (2020)

Using interviews and rare archival footage, the documentary provides an intimate account of legendary U.S. Representative John Lewis’ life, legacy and more than 60 years of extraordinary activism — from the bold teenager on the front lines of the Civil Rights movement to the legislative powerhouse.

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020)

In what would be his final role, Chadwick Boseman stars opposite Viola Davis in a film that depicts the rising tensions and temperatures at a Chicago music studio in 1927 when blues singer Ma Rainey joins her band for a recording session.

Editor’s Note: A version of this story originally appeared on NBCLX on Feb. 1, 2021.

Some, like Rev. Walter Chalmers, were on their way to work when they saw the buses heading to the capitol and decided to go march instead. Others were inspired by Rosa Parks’ activism and defiance in the face of inequality to gather at the Lincoln Memorial, picket signs at the ready, to press Washington for change.

Those who gathered under the hot sun for hours would become the eyes of history when the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom ended with Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s iconic “I Have a Dream” speech.

Learn more at Comcast NBCUniversal’s Voices of the Civil Rights Movement.

Those Who Were There

Other Activists, Leaders and Historians Share Perspectives on the March

Editor’s Note: A version of this story was originally published on August 26, 2020.

Starting Friday, the theater chain will offer a $5 Fan Fave deal for films including “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” “The Woman King,” “Till,” and “Devotion.”

The films included in the deal feature award-winning talent such as Angela Bassett, Viola Davis and Jonathan Majors, and applaud the directorial works of Gina Prince-Bythewood and Ryan Coogler.

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“Following the death of Chadwick Boseman in August 2020, it was hard to imagine how the franchise would move forward,” the company wrote. “Coogler was able to find a way to celebrate the life of the late actor, his most beloved character, and the enduring spirit of humanity in the face of grief to create an experience like none other.”

Marvel’s “Wakanda Forever” became an instant box office hit when it debuted in theaters last November. The film is still in its theatrical run and will be discounted on scheduled dates.

The promotion will only be available for select theaters across the country on the following dates:

• “Till” – Feb. 3-9
• “Devotion” – Feb. 10-16
• “The Woman King – Feb. 17-23
• “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” – Feb. 24 – March 1

Click here to learn more about the films and participating theaters.

Fred Smith, the founder of Memphis-based FedEx, financed the film about Brown because he thought Brown deserved wider recognition, a feeling his surviving relatives share, and lobbied the Trump administration to support the search efforts after consulting with Brown’s daughter, Pamela.

“I’m still determined to try to get Jesse Brown home and put him where he ought to be in Arlington (National Cemetery),” Smith said. “Among the other heroes of the republic next to his wingman, Tom Hudner.”

Smith’s daughters, Rachel and Molly, who produced the film, met members of Brown’s family at the 2018 funeral of Hudner, who received the Medal of Honor after attempting to rescue Brown. Hudner returned to North Korea in 2013 in an attempt to locate Brown’s remains, but was unsuccessful.

Jessica Knight Henry, Brown’s granddaughter, said attending Hudner’s funeral at Arlington solidified her grandmother’s desire to have her husband’s remains interred in Arlington.

The Korean War

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“He’s never had a full sort of burial with that with the pomp and circumstance that that we think is worthy of what his contribution is to this country” Knight Henry said, speaking from Washington.

Brown grew up in Mississippi, the son of sharecroppers, and succeeded in qualifying to be a pilot in the Navy, despite his training officer refusing to pin on his wings — just one of many racist insults and hurdles he overcame.

Smith has donated “Devotion”’s proceeds, in part, to endow a new scholarship fund, the Brown Hudner Navy Scholarship Foundation, for the children of Navy service members pursuing studies in STEM.

“Mr. Smith spent an incredible amount of money imaging the area where we think that my grandfather’s remains are,” said Knight Henry, adding that her family has worked with different agencies and groups to maximize any potential opportunity to get answers.

More than 7,500 American military personnel remain unaccounted for in the Korean War, according to the government agency that tracks prisoners of war and those missing in action.

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