Yearly Archives: 2020

As this is my last newsletter of 2020, I am taking a few minutes to reflect on the past twelve months. I began this year writing my weekly Best Self newsletters with a variety of personal growth topics and related journal prompts. But after the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020 and after reading extensively...

Last week I shared stories of 19^th century-born Black inventors, scientists and engineers, many of whom had little or no formal education or training, yet made major contributions to our contemporary way of life. This week, I continue that list with men and women whose names start with L through W. In sharing these stories, I hope...

Many talented members of the Black community have given much to our country and yet their achievements went unrecognized for a long time. Textbooks and classrooms in the 1950s, ‘60s and ’70s mainly provided the history of Caucasian Americans. Despite being a crucial component in the American story, the lives of many important Black Americans were...

For the past two weeks, I have written about lynchings in both Southern states and non-Southern states. Despite the slowdown in lynchings across the country, racial terrorism created a legacy of new forms of violence, a compromised criminal justice system, and long-term psychological impacts. After the rate...

WARNING: The information and photos in this newsletter can be upsetting. Lynchings were not unique to Southern states, but as the chart below indicates, the number of lynchings in non-Southern states is significantly less than those in the South. The Great Migration brought tens of thousands of African Americans to northern industrial cities. The growing Black population created...

The lynching problem / Dalrymple, 1899. Courtesy: Library of Congress

"History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.”

~ Maya Angelou, On the Pulse of Morning

WARNING: The information in this newsletter may be upsetting and potentially traumatizing. DISCLAIMER: In researching material for...

EDITORIAL NOTE: In last week's newsletter, the sub-heading 1868 – OPELOUSAS, GEORGIA should have been OPELOUSAS, LOUISIANA. As I mentioned in last week’s newsletter, an opinion piece in The Washington Post by Walter Greason entitled, “We must honor those lost to violent racism,” inspired me to learn more about the history of racial violence in our country,...

THE ISSUES

On any given day, nearly half a million people languish in jail cells across America, waiting for their criminal cases to move forward, severed from their lives and communities even though they have not been convicted of a crime. People in pretrial detention now make up more than 2/3 of America’s jail population. They...

THE FACTS:

The United States is the world’s leader in its rate of incarceration with 2.2 million people currently in federal, state or local prisons and jails – a 500% increase over the last forty years. The United States is home to 5% of the world’s population yet it now houses 25% of the world’s prison inmates....