Category: Free the Jackson Five

Close your eyes for a minute and picture a typical academically challenged, underperforming student. If you are really honest with yourself, you probably see one of the “boyz from the hood”—in other words, a black, brown, or Latino male raised in bad circumstances and going nowhere fast. For many years, the desire to avoid students…

Before I understood what “wild oats” were, my parents—especially my mother—warned me to stay away from white women. Both came of age in the pre-Emmett Till South, where black men got lynched for so much as flirting with white girls. For my mother and father, however, avoiding “playing in the snow” was more about racial…

I had begun writing on an entirely different subject for this month’s column—plea bargaining—but then a friend called to tell me that Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor III had died. I put all thoughts about plea bargains aside, went down to my basement, and dug out an old Pryor album. Staring at it, I was…

— People are talking about whether Rev. Randolph (Randy) Staten will run for his old seat representing North Minneapolis in the Minnesota House of Representatives. If he did, and won, he would become Minnesota’s version of former Washington mayor and convicted felon Marion Berry: a political player who went through a very public crash-and-burn, followed…

Sitting on my desk is the final “absolute, no kidding, no extensions possible” request for my submission to the Harvard and Radcliffe Class of 1981 Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Report. After twenty-five years, Harvard wants an accounting of what I have done with my life. I ignored the three or four previous requests because I had trials…

What does the boogeyman look like? For most Americans (even, I suspect, some of the darker ones), he’s probably big and black. The scary black man is an image older than the Republic and more enduring than apple pie and Chevrolet. The image of gangs running amok, snatching up women and anything else not nailed…