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Evanston, Illinois — the only city in America to have actually distributed reparations, is now fighting to defend its landmark program after the federal government joined a lawsuit seeking to shut it down. Launched in 2021, Evanston's program allocated $20 million to Black residents who lived in the city between 1919 and 1969 and suffered housing discrimination through city-sanctioned redlining policies. Over $7 million has already been distributed in $25,000 increments, fun

The modern job market is already brutal for new graduates, but for Black applicants, an invisible force is quietly making things worse. A landmark study tracking 3.4 million people submitting 4 million applications across 150 employers has pulled back the curtain on how AI hiring tools systematically disadvantage Black candidates before a human ever reviews their resume. Ninety percent of U.S. employers now rely on AI screening tools to sort applicants, with most using the sa

When phone calls from California prisons became free in 2023, Angel Rice's relationship with her incarcerated husband transformed. Rather than cramming life updates into expensive 15-minute windows, the couple could finally breathe. "Now we can talk," Rice told The Nation. "We can have in-depth conversations about finances, about how my day was, how his day was, what's going on in our communities, with our children… Now we have extended time to talk and be present with each o

The Trump administration has quietly moved to shield itself from accountability for deaths among undocumented immigrants in detention, by simply stopping the count. ICE has rescinded a 2021 Biden-era policy requiring the agency to report and investigate deaths occurring within 30 days of a detainee's release, a change that experts say is deliberately designed to obscure how many people are dying as a result of inadequate care during confinement. The original policy existed fo

On the morning of May 29, Cherrie Moore, a 34-year-old Black woman weighing approximately 90 pounds, was in the middle of a mental health crisis when Shelby, N.C. officer Karson Hyder straddled her body and punched her in the face with a closed fist. A Ring doorbell camera caught everything. She pleaded for him to stop. He didn't. She suffered a possible broken nose and a busted lip. This is what "help" looked like for a Black woman in crisis. Civil rights attorney Ben Crump

A federal judge has dealt a significant blow to the Trump administration's attempts to sanitize America's public history, issuing a preliminary injunction ordering the restoration of exhibits removed from national parks, museums, and landmarks under an executive order signed last year. U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley ruled that the administration's actions amounted to an effort "to rewrite the Nation's history with a white-out pen," a damning characterization of what critics

What happened to one-year-old Kohen Kartier Wiley in Senatobia, Mississippi, looks less like a justified use of force and more like an avoidable tragedy. On June 14, 2026, officers from the Senatobia Police Department and the Tate County Sheriff's Department responded to a shoplifting call at a Walmart and ended up firing into a sedan carrying the toddler, his mother, and his aunt. Kohen was killed. His aunt, who was driving, was critically wounded. The state's official accou

Jalil Richardson spent 50 days in a Florida jail for a crime committed hundreds of miles away. His wrongful arrest, driven by an AI facial recognition match, is not an anomaly. It is evidence of a broken system that must be dismantled. The Jacksonville Sheriff's Office arrested Richardson based on an 85% facial recognition match to surveillance footage from a Publix. That figure sounds authoritative. It isn't. Prosecutors ultimately dropped the case after timesheets proved

At the Los Angeles Know Your Rights Camp, Paloma Kumugai and José Fernández Brito of @immschools led an education session focused on equipping students with knowledge about their academic rights and opportunities. They reinforced that attending school is a constitutional right while exploring the historic battles fought to secure access to education. The session provided practical guidance on preparing for college, from selecting high school courses to understanding financia

SNAP enrollment has dropped sharply since the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed last summer, with over 3.5 million people losing food assistance between July 2025 and February 2026. The new law raised the work-requirement age limit from 54 to 64 and added documentation burdens, while states like Arizona have seen participation fall by roughly half. The administration frames this as a positive sign, a stronger economy, less fraud, a "return to normalcy" after pandemic-era expa

Americans exercising their constitutional right to criticize artificial intelligence are now being monitored by law enforcement; and the implications are chilling. A confidential bulletin from the Delaware Valley Intelligence Center, a Philadelphia-area fusion center, reveals that police are combing social media for anti-AI sentiment and flagging ordinary critics as potential "domestic violent extremists." The report warns that "disruptive First Amendment activity" is an "ind

Mahogany Newkirk is proof that hard work, faith, and determination can take you further than you ever imagined. This remarkable young Black woman has accomplished what most people twice her age could only dream of, and she's just getting started. A student at Harnett County Early College in North Carolina, Mahogany did something extraordinary: she earned her Associate in Arts degree from Central Carolina Community College before even receiving her high school diploma. Standin

The expansion of Atlanta's surveillance state, anchored by the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center known as "Cop City," poses serious threats to Black and Brown communities who are already disproportionately surveilled, policed, and environmentally burdened. For residents like Brian Page, a 41-year-old raising his daughter in a majority-Black DeKalb County neighborhood, the network "certainly feels like an invasion of privacy." With more than 60,000 cameras linked to law en

Dominic Antoine Jr., known affectionately as "Pooda," is proof that excellence thrives even where the odds seem stacked. This 18-year-old Oakland native, a senior at Fremont High School in East Oakland, has done something remarkable: he applied to 31 colleges and received 31 acceptances. Not a single rejection. With a 4.3 GPA earned through rigorous Advanced Placement and dual-enrollment college courses, Dominic has shattered every ceiling placed before him. On National Coll

Louisiana's Republican-controlled Legislature has signed a new congressional map eliminating one of the state's two majority-Black districts — a move critics are calling textbook voter suppression dressed in the language of legal compliance. Gov. Jeff Landry signed the map after the Supreme Court's recent ruling weakened the Voting Rights Act, the landmark 1965 law designed to protect minority voters from exactly this kind of political maneuvering. The ruling gave Republican

The debate over reparations often gets framed as a Southern issue, tied to the plantation economy of states like Mississippi or Georgia. But New York's own reparations commission, and the political turbulence surrounding it, makes a compelling case for why the conversation is just as urgent in the North. New York's Community Commission on Reparations Remedies recently had its reporting deadline pushed back to 2029, a delay embedded quietly in the state budget. While critics

The verdict felt familiar to anyone who remembers 1991. A South Carolina jury on Monday acquitted Chikei Rick Chow, 61, of murder in the 2023 shooting death of Cyrus Carmack-Belton, a 14-year-old Black boy shot in the back outside a Columbia convenience store, and the echoes of Latasha Harlins rang loud. Harlins was 15 when Soon Ja Du shot her in the back of the head at a Los Angeles liquor store over a $1.79 bottle of orange juice. Du was convicted, then sentenced to probati

Our justice system failed three men for 28 years, and that failure demands a reckoning. In 1997, Jermal Shuler, Marc Brittingham, and Rasheed Turner were convicted of murder in Philadelphia based on a single eyewitness who claimed to see them leaving the victim's home Saturday evening. There was no physical evidence. The witness faced "significant credibility challenges at trial." Yet the prosecution leaned on a medical examiner's testimony to anchor the timeline, and three

Harvard University's handling of its slavery legacy research reveals a troubling pattern of suppression and retaliation that betrays the institution's 2022 commitment to openness and accountability. Christopher Newman, a Howard University doctoral student interning with Harvard University Archives, was escorted off campus by police, banned, and denied access to his belongings after simply suggesting the university investigate its ties to Antigua. His crime, in his own words,

In yet another chapter of the long, painful history of Black land dispossession in America, the Georgia Court of Appeals has sanctioned what many view as the theft of generational Black-owned land in Sparta, Georgia. On Wednesday, the court upheld a lower court's ruling allowing Sandersville Railroad to exercise eminent domain against Blaine Smith and other Black landowners to construct a rail spur through their properties. For nearly three years, the Smiths and their neighbo