Body of Color

Naima Lowe’s Installation ‘Ropes, Pinks’ Uncoils Trauma in Pursuit of Black Freedom

Consisting of three lengths of cotton and hemp rope of varying thicknesses—200 feet in all—dyed in shades of pink, “Ropes, Pinks” is an installation work by artist Naima Lowe. This “body” changes each time it is installed, adapting to and challenging the space where it finds itself attempting to be at home. In so doing, it twines itself around and among questions of racist horror, gender, intimacy, vulnerability, history, and love.

Lowe has exhibited videos, performances, and installations throughout the United States and created the independent art and design imprint Trial …

Interview by Minal Hajratwala | January 14, 2021

A College Founded on an Antebellum Plantation Digs Into the Darkness of Its Past | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

A College Founded on an Antebellum Plantation Digs Into the Pain of Its Past

How Sweet Briar Is Finally Remembering the Enslaved People Who Built—And Were Buried Beneath—Its Campus

by Lynn Rainville | January 11, 2021

Twenty years ago, an equestrian instructor at Sweet Briar College in rural Virginia stumbled over a stone in one of the horseback riding rings. It turned out to be a …

In the Crisis of COVID, a Moment of Awakening for Women

The Pandemic Has Pulled Back the Curtain on Gender Inequity in the U.S.—In Politics and Beyond

by Jackie Mansky | September 17, 2020

The image of California state Assemblymember Buffy Wicks holding her 4-week-old baby on the legislative floor earlier this month after her request to vote by proxy was denied loomed over …

The Incredible Legacy of Newark’s Black Women Activists

Harlem Renaissance Writer Brenda Ray Moryck and a New Jersey Community’s Untold Century of Intellectualism and Artistry

by Noelle Lorraine Williams | September 14, 2020

In 1927, Brenda Ray Moryck, a 32-year-old Black American woman from Newark, New Jersey, published a manifesto in Ebony and Topaz, a prominent Harlem Renaissance anthology of prose and poetry.

In …

How the Yellow House Helped Make Washington, D.C., a Slavery Capital

The Notorious Jail Lent Institutional Support to Slavery Throughout the South

by Jeff Forret | July 15, 2020

Washington, D.C., was a capital not just of the United States, but of slavery, serving as a major depot in the domestic slave trade. In the District, enslaved men, women, …

‘America’s Black Dreyfus Affair,’ and the Long Battle to Right Teddy Roosevelt’s Wrong

167 Black Soldiers Were Dishonorably Discharged from the Army in 1906. Two Angelenos Corrected the Historical Record in the 1970s

by Julia Bricklin | July 13, 2020

As a youngster, John Downing Weaver paid little attention to his mother when she told him stories of her and his father’s trip to Brownsville, Texas, in 1909. It wasn’t …

African American history