Like many institutions looking to respond to Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination and open its doors to minorities in a meaningful way, University of Illinois jumped head first into an ambitious plan, known as Project 500, to enroll 500 Black freshmen. In this article, the author features the story of Patricia McKinney Lewis, who was one of the…

With Barack Obama ensconced as the nation's first Black president, plenty of voices in the national conversation are trumpeting America as a post-racial society--that race matters much less than it used to, that the boundaries of race have been overcome, that racism is no longer a big problem. In this article, longtime scholars whose life's work…

Typically, the period between the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday in mid-January and the end of Black History Month in February sees serious and sober public discussions about the state of Black America. Those discussions have heated up earlier than expected due to the November release of a national survey on Black social progress by the…

To this day, the widespread racial disparities that prompted the August 1965 riots in the Watts community of South Los Angeles frame many of the discussions about race in America. The death and destruction wrought during that five-day upheaval, along with the findings of the December 1965 McCone report that the lack of adequate health care…