theblackbottom

Akiba Solomon writes Colorlines’ Gender Matters blog and is an NABJ-Award winning writer, freelance journalist, editor and essayist from West Philadelphia. A graduate of Howard University, the Brooklyn resident co-edited Naked: Black Women Bare All About Their Skin, Hair, Hips, Lips, and Other Parts (Perigee, 2005), an anthology of original essays and oral [...]

Source: New York Times
David Snell knew only two other black gay people while growing up in Madison, N.J., an upper-middle-class town with white-picket fences, a mostly Irish and Italian population. One was a 13-year-old boy whom Snell encountered at his small Baptist church.
At Sunday school, the boy started crying. Snell said that [...]

Source: PRI’s The World
This story from Public Radio International’s The World equally applies to churches within African American communities. We hope tbb readers will listen and apply the discussion to the crisis of HIV within black American communities. We need more churches on board with HIV prevention.

Huffington Post
CNN announced Wednesday that it is suspending Roland Martin in the wake of the pundit’s controversial Super Bowl tweets.

The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple posted this statement from the network:

“Roland Martin’s tweets were regrettable and offensive. Language that demeans is inconsistent with the values and culture of our organization, and is not tolerated. We have [...]

Cameroon gay rights lawyer Alice Nkom says: ‘I know there’s a risk but when you are doing something that is right, you just do it … someone has to.’ Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian

Source: The Guardian
Alice Nkom is a Cameroonian lawyer with an imposing presence, but her country’s minister of [...]

Once You Learn How To Read, You Will Be Forever Free~Frederick Douglass
REVIEW ALLISTER SPARKS has been a friend and comrade of Desmond Tutu for many decades. Sparks was editor of The Rand Daily Mail from 1977 to 1981 and South African correspondent for The Washington Post, The Observer and Holland’s leading newspaper, NRC Handelsblad, [...]

Source: Washington Post
Playwright Robert O’Hara lives in New York City but loves working in Washington because he sees it as a place of stark and outrageous contradictions: It is a city filled with black people surrounded by monuments named for dead white men. It is a beacon of democracy whose residents [...]

According to the Economist magazine: OVER a third of Africa’s 1 billion inhabitants currently live in urban areas, but by 2030 that proportion will have risen to a half. According to a recent report from UN-HABITAT, the United Nations agency for human settlements, the population of some cities is set to swell by up to [...]

To the relief of many on the political left, last week’s budget negotiations ended in a compromise that spared funding for Planned Parenthood. Republicans targeted the family planning agency — one of the largest recipients of Title X, the federal grant program dedicated to reproductive health services for low-income patients — because it provides abortions, [...]

Malika Saada Saar, founder and director of The Rebecca Project for Human Rights. She works to reform policies that affect women and girls in health, child-welfare and criminal-justice systems in the U.S. and Africa. Here, she explains how women who had once been trafficked through Craigslist came up with a solution to end it. Mrs. [...]