Book Review: The Mouthpiece: Nkechi Taifa Bares Her Soul, Scars and Hopes

Black Power, Black Lawyer: My Audacious Quest For Justice. Nkechi Taifa. Foreword by Greg Carr. Washington, D.C.: House of Songhay II., 379 pp. Reviewed by Todd Steven Burroughs Back in the days when radicalism was the norm in Black America and elsewhere, there once was a girl who sat on a Black Panther’s lap, abandoned…

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The Revolution On Your Momma’s Coffee Table: Lerone Bennett Jr., Black Power, Pan-Africanism and the Schizophrenia of Ebony Magazine, 1966-1976

It’s September 1966, and the regular reader of Ebony gets the sinking feeling that its jali, Lerone Bennett Jr., is a little disconcerted. In the article, the magazine editor and history book author is in a vehicle zooming along in South Carolina at 70 mph by Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee chairman Stokely Carmichael, and a…

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BREAKING (NON-) NEWS: Attention, Mumia! No Reading (About the Young Lords Party) Allowed!

Why could Mumia Abu-Jamal receive books on Death Row in the 1980s, 1990s and 00s but is severely restricted in his ability to receive books in 2020, even though he is in general population? In the Acknowledgements section of Johanna Fernandez’s new book, The Young Lords: A Radical History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina…

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Newark’s Black-Powered Engineer: Kenneth Gibson (1932-2019)

By Todd Steven Burroughs NEWARK SYMPHONY HALL was, at best, half full Thursday night for the funeral of Kenneth Gibson, whose full surname will always be Newark’s first African-American mayor and the first Black mayor of a major northeastern city. It was packed for Amiri Baraka, but that was five years ago. Cinco years is…

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That Time Rutgers-Newark Black Students Took Over Conklin Hall 50 Years Ago, Renaming It “Liberation Hall”

Pictured above: Members of the Rutgers University Black Organization of Students (BOS) unfurl a banner renaming Rutgers-Newark’s Conklin Hall in February of 1969. A little less than two years after the Newark rebellion of July 1967 and months before Fred Hampton’s assassination in December of 1969, Black student activists took over Conklin Hall at Rutgers-Newark….

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Black Universities: Shelter Or Storm?

Are Historically Black Colleges and Universities understood? Do HBCUs foster Black unity and radicalism or conservative acceptance of and adherence to establishment whims? What was the role of the HBCU historically versus today? We talked about this and much more with Dr. Jelani Favors whose new book: Shelter in a Time of Storm How Black…

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