theblackbottom

Daughter of a aristocratic WASP and Haitian Songbird, Susan Fales-Hill presents a rewarding novel of her adventures.

The memoirist-philanthropist-TV producer talks about her debut novel, Bill Cosby, Lena Horne and the philanthropic life.
By: The Root.com
The intrigue in One Flight Up, the first novel by Susan Fales-Hill, begins before the story does. Just after the title page, [...]

You know you’re watching a groundbreaking documentary when it not only forces you out of your comfort zone but also manages to persuade you to reassess your point-of-view without resorting to potentially-alienating polemic.
This is the case with Biracial, Not Black, Damn It!, a poignant, thought-provoking and ultimately most-enlightening film directed by the brilliant Carolyn Battle [...]

If you learn how to read, you will be forever free! ~ Frederick Douglass
REVIEW
REVIEW
Listen to an interview with James T. Paris on NPR’s Diane Rehm Show
James T. Patterson is Ford Foundation Professor of History emeritus at Brown University, where he taught for thirty years. His research interests include political, legal, and social history, as well [...]

Race is a fiction! Racial categorizations were reified by the United States census, which was mandated by United States Constitution and the Congress in 1790. Now that date should sound alarm bells or cause one to pause with some kind of vague historical recollection. In 1790, the transatlantic slave trade was still in operation when [...]

April 3, 2010
ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON — He may be the world’s foremost mixed-race leader, but when it came to the official government head count, President Barack Obama gave only one answer to the question about his ethnic background:
The White House confirmed on Friday that Obama did not check multiple boxes on his U.S. Census form, or [...]

Once you learn how to read, you will be forever free!–Frederick Douglass
REVIEW
REVIEW
Nell Irvin Painter is the award-winning author of many books, including Sojourner Truth, Southern History Across the Color Line, Creating Black Americans, The History of White People, and Standing at Armageddon. She is currently the Edwards Professor of American History, Emerita, at Princeton [...]

Last week we featured the Poet Ai as our Tuesday Poet. Sadly we learned that she died this past Saturday March 20, 2010 in Stillwater, Oklahoma. Here is her obituary from The Daily O’Collegian, the Oklahoma State University student newspaper.
OSU creative writing professor and poet Ai Ogawa, 62, died from illness Saturday.
“She was admitted to [...]

Ai was born Florence Anthony (1947). Ai, who has described herself as 1/2 Japanese, Choctaw-Chickasaw, Black, Irish, Southern Cheyenne, and Comanche, was born in Albany, Texas, in 1947; she grew up in Tucson, Arizona. She legally changed her name to “Ai,” which means “love” in Japanese. Ai holds a B.A. in Japanese from the [...]

Poet Natasha Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi. Her first poetry collection, Domestic Work (Graywolf Press, 2000), won the inaugural 1999 Cave Canem poetry prize (selected by Rita Dove), a 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize, and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry. Her second collection, Bellocq’s Ophelia (Graywolf, 2002), received [...]