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: Shadow and the Act, IndieWire
FREE ANGELA is a work-in-progress feature-length documentary about Angela Davis and the high stakes crime, political movement, and trial that catapults the 26 year-old newly appointed philosophy professor at the University of California at Los Angeles into a seventies revolutionary political icon.
Nearly forty years later, and for the first time, [...]

The whole world opened to me when I learned to read~Mary McCleod Bethune
Once you learn how to read, you will be forever free!~Frederick Douglass

REVIEW
Randal Maurice Jelks is an Associate Professor of American Studies with a joint appointment in African and African American Studies. He is co-editor of the journal American Studies and a co-founder and [...]

Source: sonya-renee.com
Award winning Poet, Activist and Transformational leader Sonya Renee believes in the life shifting power of art. Sonya is a National and International poetry slam champion who has shared her work and on stages across the US, New Zealand, Australia, England, Scotland, Sweden, Canada and the Netherlands in prisons, treatment facilities, homeless shelters, universities, [...]

Zina Saro-Wiwa is a documentary maker and video artist. Her work includes the documentary “This Is My Africa,” which was broadcast on HBO. She is British-Nigerian and lives in Brooklyn.

Source: Miami Herald
So the people got sick of it, all those criminals being coddled by all those bleeding heart liberal judges with all their soft-headed concern for rights and rehabilitation. And a wave swept this country in the Reagan years, a wave ridden by pundits and politicians seeking power, a wave [...]

Source: Indiewire
The 8th annual Images of Black Women Film Festival will take place at The Tricycle Theatre in London from the weekend of Friday April 13 to Sunday April 15th
The festival, which advocates in its words “cinematic justice” for black women will feature various film screenings of features and shorts includng Victois Mahoney’s Yelling to [...]

Once You Learn How To Read, You Will Be Forever Free!~Frederick Douglass
REVIEW Esi Edugyan has a Masters in Writing from Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. Her work has appeared in several anthologies, including Best New American Voices 2003, ed. Joyce Carol Oates, and Revival: An Anthology of Black Canadian Writing (2006).
Her debut novel, The Second [...]

In the pre-dawn darkness, the gym doors close, and the black women start to move. House versions of Whitney Houston’s “I’m Every Woman,” and Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep,” blare from speakers as the 30 or so women, most with curves, not angles, grab their jump ropes at the L.A. Fitness club in Capitol [...]

Source: Tavis Smiley Show, PBS
This is a rich conversation between Tavis Smiley, Viola Davis, and Octavia Spencer. A really worthwhile conversation!

Watch Actresses Viola Davis & Octavia Spencer on PBS. See more from Tavis Smiley.