Happy Music Monday, you all. And welcome to this second week of Black Music Month. Back in April, PBS dropped Independent Lens: We Want the Funk! Director Stanley Nelson and producer Nicole ...

This “Great Moments in Funk aka Funk 101” playlist offers the classic funk songs featured in the film and includes many hip hop tracks that sample them. I’ve also added modern funk disciples like Silk ...

Born 100 years ago today as Malcolm Little on May 19, 1925 in Omaha, Nebraska and known primarily as Malcolm X, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz‎ was an African-American minister for the Nation of Islam and a ...

Yesterday I was tagged in a post by an old high school friend, asking me and a few others a very public, direct question about white privilege and racism. I feel compelled not only to publish his ...

We talk about how African Americans invented rock and roll. We talk about the great musicians Scott Joplin and W.C. Handy, the giant of ragtime and the “Father of the Blues.” Before rock and roll was ...

[Top L to R: Monika Schleier-Smith, Ralph Lemon, N.K. Jemisin, Jacqueline Woodson; Bottom L to R: Fred Moten, Cécile McLorin Salvant, Catherine Coleman Flowers, Tressie McMillan Cottom and Thomas ...

Greetings! It’s your friend and selector, Marlon, again. Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s joyous, crisply edited and well observed documentary about Sly Stone dropped in February on Hulu and Disney+. It ...

According to headcount.org, here is the list of voter registration deadlines in all 50 states. If you haven’t signed up already, sign up!

With the passing of two Civil Rights Movement titans, the Reverend C.T. Vivian and Rep. John Lewis, I was inclined to honor them with a playlist. After some poking around, I read that Rep. Lewis was a ...

“I walked forty-seven miles of barbed wire / I got a cobra snake for a necktie / A brand new house on the roadside / and it’s a-made out of rattlesnake hide / Got a brand new chimney put on top / and ...

On October 31, 1965, Louis “Pops” (or “Satchmo”) Armstrong gave his first performance in New Orleans, his home town, in nine years. As a boy, he had busked on street corners. At twelve, he marched in ...

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled race-conscious college admissions policies and practices unconstitutional. Affirmative Action opponents have long argued that admitting presumably unqualified ...