An investigation into serial killings in a small North Carolina city.

“Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage.”

Remembering jazz musician Ornette Coleman.

A black British father on his 12 years in the U.S.

On black bodies in the age of the Charleston shootings.

The story of Ota Benga, captured in the Congo, displayed at the World’s Fair, and brought to the Bronx Zoo in 1906.

The role of black dolls in American culture.

A controversial effort divides students by race in order to combat racism.

Revisiting the 6200 block of Osage Avenue.

A meditation on life in the black “upper class.”

The rise and fall of “America’s most exciting black scholar.”

What led to the 1970 explosion of a Greenwich Village townhouse, in which three members of the Weather Underground were killed, and what happened to the group after.

Excerpted from Days of Rage.

“The regular average layman couldn’t see what I see. And the way they’re painting the trainer is all wrong. Look at him there, screaming, Do this! and Do that! I never had anyone telling me what to do. I did it. Shouting at the fighter like that makes him look like an animal, like a horse to be trained.”

"Some of you probably think it’s a bad thing to group ourselves according to skin color—the lighter the better—in social clubs, neighborhoods, churches, sororities, even colored schools. But how else can we hold on to a little dignity?"

For generations, plantation owners strove to keep black laborers on the farm and competing businesses out of town. Today, the towns faring best are the ones whose white residents stayed to reckon with their own history.

On Ferguson, Cosby, and what ‘racial progress’ really means.

“My Vassar College Faculty ID affords me free smoothies, free printing paper, paid leave, and access to one of the most beautiful libraries on Earth. It guarantees that I have really good health care and more disposable income than anyone in my Mississippi family. But way more than I want to admit, I’m wondering what price we pay for these kinds of ID’s, and what that price has to do with the extrajudicial disciplining and killing of young black human beings.”

On an African-American entrepreneur and race in Silicon Valley.

Vivien Thomas was paid a janitor’s wage, never went to college, and still became a legend in the field of heart surgery.

“We, the writers—a word I am using in its most primitive sense—arrived in Chicago about 10 days before the baffling, bruising, an unbelievable two minutes and six seconds at Comiskey Park. We will get to all that later.”

“I am having a moment, but I only want more. I need more. I cannot merely be good enough because I am chased by the pernicious whispers that I might only be ‘good enough for a black woman.’”

Current personal problems are tied to racial issues from years past.

"Helen Conley knew this story: When Maxwell Conley was sixteen and in high school, with a bad attitude like many of us have, two young members of the Black Panther Party saved his life. It happened because a recent veteran of the war in Vietnam woke up one morning believing he was still in the jungle. Adrenaline began pumping through his body at impressive levels. He didn't have a gun, but he found an oak baseball bat in the alley behind his mother's apartment building. He laced up his combat boots. He stormed down the street until he came to the high school. He kicked open the doors of the school, and came through the hallway breathing hard, fists clenched around the bat. It was seventh period. The hallway was quiet. Around the corner came Maxwell Conley, cutting class as was his custom. He was not sober. He was wondering why Kay Svenson wouldn't pay attention to him in art class. He was admiring his long curly hair in the reflection of the fire extinguisher case mounted on the wall. His Converse sneakers flapped open and his unwashed sock came through. The Vietnam veteran, only a few years older than Maxwell Conley, met him in the hallway, and wasted no time."

“They thought they were going to change the world,” he says of the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project volunteers. “They didn’t expect that white folks would be so vicious.”

On learning a new language, a new culture, and why “it must never be concluded that an urge toward the cosmopolitan, toward true education, will make people stop hitting you.”

On being black in an all-white Swiss village.