21st century Black children and adolescents have lost a connection with the social and cultural currents of the mid-20th century. The author, while she acknowledges the troubles that plagued the Black community in the past, laments what Black culture has become in the age of integration. She ties this concern to the similar decline of Black…

Every year, historians in the United States attend the American Historical Association (AHA), a conference that has met annually since 1884. The AHA draws scholars from all specializations, and it is the primary organization through which the profession is represented. In 1969, the conference met at the Sheraton Park Hotel in Washington, D.C. At…

For nearly three decades, the environmental justice movement has attracted thousands of activists, scholars and ordinary citizens to mobilize on behalf of communities that have been overburdened with hazardous waste sites, petrochemical plants, incinerators, lead contamination, polluted air and contaminated drinking water. In many cases, activists…

Social capital theory is used as a lens for examining the culture of an African American college student-led movement during the events of the San Francisco State College strike that began in 1968. Results reveal strong ties with the African American community as well as with a number of on- and off-campus networks. An in-depth look at the ties…

After more than 15 years of comparative study of minority education, I concluded that I would have to study two additional factors, namely collective identity and cultural frame of reference to more fully explain the variability in minority school performance. In 1986, I published an article with Signithia Fordham on how "oppositional…

The Media Project was created to facilitate the journey of "inner city" high school students as they learned to make their first short films. Their leader chose to enlist the support of a professional cinematographer, production manager, editor, and director, to see that the final short films are of a high quality. The six teenagers experienced…

The relationship between the nineteenth century Colored Public Schools of Cincinnati and the overall African American community in the nineteenth-century "borderland" city of Cincinnati is examined. It is concluded that the employment of African American teachers, while a positive development in itself, apparently failed to lead to significant…

Interviews with African American and White American elders capture the immediate power of the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision and the biography of its impact over time. This article reviews the lived experience of the decision and theorizes 3 threats to sustainability that ruthlessly undermined the decision over time: (a) the…

Historically, religion and spirituality have been major influences in the social, cultural, and political lives of African Americans. Spirituality is deeply embedded into their rich cultural heritage, and it is intertwined into all aspects of their life, including beliefs about health and illness. For African Americans, health and illness are a…

As the country celebrates the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the case that ended legal segregation in American public schools, young Black men are, by most social indicators, unraveling at the seams. More are being incarcerated, more are rejecting fatherhood, more are dropping out of high school and fewer are going to college.…

This essay examines the April 1966 student walkout at Detroit's all-black Northern High School and what the boycott tells us about the conflict between blacks and whites in that city over the education of African-American youth. The protest was one event in an ongoing struggle between Detroit's black citizens and the city's largely white…

This study found that African American males living with HIV/AIDS in rural southwest Alabama who did not disclose their HIV/AIDS seropositive status were more likely to engage in unprotected sex. Because much of the recent research is slanted to address homosexual behavior, which is still a taboo within the African American community, efforts to…

The entire world saw the images of Black New Orleans residents left homeless, jobless and helpless by the arrival and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The pictures and stories dominated mainstream news outlets for weeks. What hasn't been widely publicized, however, are the Katrina-related ordeals of Vietnamese Americans, another socio-economically…

This article provides a brief review of the literature on the legal, social, and racial factors that affect and describe minority confinement in the juvenile justice system. To identify appropriate literature, the authors searched electronic resources through the University of Maryland library research system called Research Port. The findings in…

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) began, upon its institution in 2002, to hold states more directly accountable for the progress of all students, including students of color and students of low socioeconomic status (SES). These groups of students have historically performed less well than their White or upper-class peers. In 2001, prior…