Category: Articles

  • Leone Jacovacci (a.k.a. John Douglas Walker and Jack Walker) was born in 1902 in the village of Pombo in the then Belgian Congo (now Democratic Republic of the Congo), the son of an Italian man and a Congolese woman. He was raised in Italy which was rough for him, given that he was bi-racial, and as a…

  • A Good Fellow and a Wise Guy The New York Sun 2006-08-09 William Bryk Book Review A Pickpocket’s Tale: The Underworld of Nineteenth-Century New York by Timothy J. Gilfoyle George Washington Appo, the once notorious Asian-Irish-American petty criminal who flourished during the last quarter of the 19th century as a pickpocket and swindler, had pretty…

  • Katherine Johnson’s inspirational story came to the Baltimore stage in 2015, thanks to another space scientist.

  • My mom is Chinese, with black hair and tan skin. My dad is white, with light eyes and skin the color of office paper. I, on the other hand, am an awkward midway point: dark skin, but not super dark; black hair, but not super black. It used to be that I never thought about…

  • I am excited to continue working on my dissertation that describes innovative writing practices in contemporary Afro-German literature. My project focuses on rhetorical, intertextual and aesthetic strategies as creative devices for a diasporic literary history. My analysis includes fictional/non-fictional texts comprised of Afro-German poetry and autobiographies…

  • The evening progressed and it seemed to be going well: small talk was made, jokes (and shots) were shared. On the dance floor, a new acquaintance leaned in all conspiratorial to tell me something about having slept with a guy at the bar. “Over there,” she said. “The half-caste guy.”

  • It is the very subject of “Resonance,” North Corner Chamber Orchestra’s concert “Celebrating Black American Composers,” that left Seattle-based composer Hanna Benn, 29, in a bit of quandary. As much as she was delighted to work with one of the world’s few conductorless chamber orchestras, her commission to honor black American composers left her pondering…

  • “Krazy Kat,” created by George Herriman, is one of the most influential comic strips of all time. Centered around the iconic love triangle of Krazy, Ignatz Mouse and Offisa Pupp, the feature ran as a syndicated newspaper strip from 1913 to 1944. To a modern audience the strip can be difficult to understand, if not…

  • The odds were certainly against William Henry Ellis, who was born into slavery on a Texas cotton plantation near the Mexico border. But a combination of sheer moxie, an ability to speak Spanish and an olive skin allowed Ellis to reinvent himself.

  • Philip Roth’s novel and the film made from it, The Human Stain, were both very much on my mind when I came across at a Hollywood Video store the video of this 1949 film about a “Negro” man and his wife who pass for white for twenty years.