Heather McGhee Wins the 2022 Zócalo Book Prize

The Sum of Us Shows How Racism Costs Us All, and What Americans Can Do to Prosper Together

Heather McGhee, the former president of the think tank Demos and a scholar of economic and social policy, is the winner of the 2022 Zócalo Public Square Book Prize for The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together.

Zócalo awards the $10,000 prize annually to the nonfiction book that most enhances our understanding of community and the forces that strengthen or undermine human connectedness and social cohesion. McGhee, our 12th annual winner, joins a distinguished group of authors that includes Danielle Allen, Michael Ignatieff, Sherry …

Interview by Sarah Rothbard | April 25, 2022

Is Black Veganism the Future of Soul Food?

What Animates the Cuisine Isn't the Chicken or the Hog—It's the Spirit of Preservation and Promotion of Black Identity

by Christopher Carter | January 31, 2022

Soul food is famously revered for pork and barbecue, for savory side dishes cooked in lard. I am a Black man who grew up loving my mother’s cornbread dressing and …

The Mississippi Sharecropper Who Helped Black Americans Win Voting Rights

Fannie Lou Hamer's Legacy Reminds Us That Everyday People Can Effect Change—Even When the Nation Is Impossibly Divided

by Kate Clifford Larson | November 8, 2021

Though Black people represented 50 percent of Mississippi’s voting age population in 1964, Jim Crow literacy tests, poll taxes, violence, and intimidation had managed to all but silence their political …

Angelic Choir of the First Baptist Church of Nutley

The 1960s Gospel Hit That Defined a Genre and an Era

Recorded in the Wake of the Birmingham Bombing, the Faith-Fueled Power of 'Peace Be Still' Endures Today

by Robert M. Marovich | September 27, 2021

“Peace Be Still,” a six-minute-long hymn, swept gospel radio in 1963.

Recorded just four days after the devastating bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, it became an …

How South (Central) L.A. Is Forging Its Future

Where Movements and Place Make the People and Their Dreams

by Jackie Mansky | July 28, 2021

Under the shade of Mercado La Paloma’s gold medallion trees, some 200 masked guests gathered to take part in Zócalo Public Square’s long-awaited return to in-person programming.

The open-air event, which …

Searching for My Grandfather and the Tulsa in Me

100 Years Later, I’m Still Sifting Through the Tulsa Race Massacre’s Destruction to Find Our Family’s History

by Olga Idriss Davis | June 3, 2021

I am my father’s daughter.

I am the first-born daughter, the middle child, who was called Sweet Pea, Mama-Daddy, and Peanie. Naming is very important in the Black community. The …

African American history