With COVID restrictions in place, the cheering section at this year’s Olympics may be a little quieter than usual. Still, the pomp and circumstance are still on display in Tokyo, as the world’s greatest athletes come together to compete. But the global stage isn’t just a chance to display athletic feats, it’s also an opportunity for some athletes to make a statement. Several women’s soccer teams, including the US team, have taken a knee before matches. And before the Olympics started, American h...
Jul 29, 2021•31 min
Sometimes discrimination is systemic. Sometimes it’s emotional. And sometimes, it’s made of brick and mortar. The Eight Mile Wall in Detroit, also known as the Birwood Wall and the Wailing Wall, was built in 1941 to separate Black and white residents in what is now known as the Wyoming neighborhood. Erin Einhorn is an NBC News national reporter based in Detroit. She recently teamed up with Olivia Lewis, a reporter and editor for the local nonprofit newsroom Bridge Detroit to outline the creation...
Jul 22, 2021•26 min
Ed Forchion, also known as NJWeedman, was a casualty of the War on Drugs, incarcerated on weed charges at the end of the 1990s. Across the country, Black people were disproportionately harmed by the War on Drugs, and in New Jersey, the ACLU found that even in the last decade, if you’re Black you’re 3.5 times more likely to be arrested for weed. But now, voters have opted to legalize recreational marijuana in the state. And the move raises the question of whether and how Black people will benefit...
Jul 15, 2021•35 min
When Brent Leggs started as a preservationist with the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 2005, his first big project was to restore Joe Frazier’s Gym in Philadelphia. The late boxing champion’s former building was being turned into a discount furniture outlet. Brent and his colleagues knew the space had the power to tell a story of Black achievement and history, so they worked to restore he gym as a symbol of community pride. Brent is now the Executive Director of the Trust’s African A...
Jul 08, 2021•28 min
Critical Race Theory. It feels like all of a sudden, this term is just everywhere. White parents are protesting Critical Race Theory, falsely claiming it’s being used in social studies and anti-racist trainings to teach their children to hate themselves. Republican-led states across the country are introducing legislation to ban it from being taught in public schools. Fox News mentioned the term almost 1,300 times from March to mid-June. But here’s the thing: almost everything these people are s...
Jul 01, 2021•28 min
After George Floyd’s murder, police departments across the country faced criticisms of systemic bias and a failure to reflect the communities they patrol and so they worked to enact reforms. But diversifying efforts have been underway for years inside the Miami Police Department. Roughly a quarter of all officers in Miami PD are Black, which is a much greater percentage than the city’s overall Black population. Over the past year, Black officers have been pushing for even more reform within the ...
Jun 24, 2021•41 min
Saturday marks Juneteenth, when the last enslaved people in Galveston, Texas finally got word of their freedom in 1865. This came two years after the Emancipation Proclamation, which despite popular opinion did not automatically free every enslaved person. Washington D.C. was among the first cities to end slavery, doing so in April of 1862, months before President Abraham Lincoln’s historic speech. But many D.C. residents argue full democracy and freedom is still out of reach. Saturday marks Jun...
Jun 17, 2021•34 min
In a world where being Black and free are not always congruent, Black folks in America have always found ways of escaping the strictures of this country’s racial boundaries. In the summer, that meant leaving town, with kids getting sent South to visit relatives, road trips to safe swimming holes, and some heading to historically Black summer havens like Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts and Idlewild in Michigan. These Black Edens drew generations of upwardly mobile Black people wh...
Jun 10, 2021•30 min
100 years ago this week, a white mob burned down Tulsa's Greenwood District, a bustling business district. For decades, the government refused to acknowledge the Tulsa Race Massacre ever happened. Only now, 100 years later, is an effort is underway to identify mass graves in Tulsa. Trymaine Lee visits a mass grave site with Kavin Ross, a local journalist, activist, and descendent of victims of the massacre. But even as Black Tulsa has fought to unearth the truth and recover the remains of their ...
Jun 03, 2021•43 min
100 years ago this week, the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma experienced one of the worst incidents of racial violence in this country’s history when a white mob laid siege to the prosperous Greenwood district. Greenwood was known as “Black Wall Street,” a nickname given by Booker T. Washington, for the number of wealthy Black families and Black owned businesses. In less than 48 hours, from May 31 to June 1, 1921, the community was destroyed. Death tolls are disputed, but 300 Black people are believed t...
May 27, 2021•46 min
Since the murder of George Floyd on May 25th 2020, America has been reeling from the shock of that initial violent act and the anguish that sent thousands into the streets in protest across the country. And when those guilty verdicts were delivered, some were brought to tears that a black family had finally tasted something close to justice. But one verdict does little to untether America from its roots, some four hundred years deep and growing. Have the past year of protests and the push for re...
May 25, 2021•40 min
The world met Christopher Martin when he testified in the Derek Chauvin trial. Christopherwas just 18-years-old when he accepted a counterfeit $20 bill from George Floyd as a clerk at a Minneapolis Cup Foods. That bill led to a 911 call, and eventually George Floyd’s death.Christopher’s composed yet emotional testimony over his role and his guilt resonated across the country, but his own story is still mostly untold. Christopher opens up to Trymaine Lee about his life before George Floyd, the tr...
May 20, 2021•51 min
Black men are crying out. Suicide is one of the leading causes of death for young Black Americans and our young men are at particular risk. Stigmas, health care access, and social pressures to appear hyper-masculine stop a lot of Black men from getting help. But a grassroots program known as The Confess Project is trying to break this pattern. The group started in Little Rock, Arkansas in 2016, and now trains barbers across the country to act as mental health advocates by equipping them with str...
May 13, 2021•33 min
It often takes a tragedy to start a conversation around reform in this country. So when two Black men, Duante Wright and Andrew Brown Jr., were killed by police last month as officers were attempting to serve arrest warrants, calls for warrant reform joined the chorus of other demands for change. Last week, Minnesota lawmakers began the process of trying to answer those calls and put forward a bill that would replace arrest warrants with a written warning system for most misdemeanor offenses. Fe...
May 06, 2021•26 min
President Joe Biden spent his first 100 days in office passing the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill, rolling back executive orders signed by former President Donald Trump, and ramping up a massive vaccination program. 140 million Americans now have at least one dose of the vaccine. His approval ratings are generally high, around 53% according to a new NBC poll. Among Black Americans, it’s much higher, a whopping 83%. But alongside those numbers is a promise Joe Biden made back in November, ...
Apr 29, 2021•27 min
Three hundred and thirty-one days ago, Derek Chauvin put his knee on the neck of George Floyd for 9 minutes and 29 seconds. George Floyd took his last breath on his stomach, hands cuffed behind his back. His death, captured on cell phone video by 17-year-old Darnella Frazier, sparked a summer of unrest and calls to abolish the police around the country. This week, after a televised trial and around 11 hours of deliberation, the jury found Derek Chauvin guilty of all three charges he faced: secon...
Apr 22, 2021•29 min
The filibuster is one of the better-known bits of procedure in the Senate. It might conjure images of politicians droning on for hours, or simply partisan gridlock, but the rule has an insidious, racial history. Senators have used it as a tool to block civil rights legislation since the later part of the 18th century. But this history isn’t confined to the past. Today, the threat of a filibuster is colliding with a fight over the future of voting rights, as Republicans vow to block a bill called...
Apr 15, 2021•29 min
It’s the second week of the trial of former Minneapolis police officerDerek Chauvin, and witnesses of all ages have been asked to recount what they saw on May 25th, 2020, as Chauvin kneeled on George Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes. Emotions in the courtroom have run high as witnesses have been asked to relive the trauma of last summer. In this episode, Dr. BraVada Garrett-Akinsanya, founder of the African American Wellness Institute , a mental health agency in Minneapolis, speaks with Trym...
Apr 08, 2021•31 min
Malcolm X and the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. met just one time in life, on March 26, 1964, during Congressional hearings for the Civil Rights Act. The two are often described as opposites, and their styles in the fight for Black freedom were undoubtedly different. But the men had a respect for each other that grew into a deep bond between the two families following their assassinations. Today, Ilyasah Shabazz, the daughters of Malcolm X, and Dr. Bernice King, the daughter of MLK, share a birth...
Apr 01, 2021•30 min
Tucked inside the $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill signed by President Biden on March 11, 2021, is $5 billion worth of aid to help Black and disadvantaged farmers. The American Rescue Plan includes $4 billion to erase debt for any farmer with an outstanding loan that involves the USDA. And an additional $1 billion dollars has been planned for training, technical assistance, and legal aid... all aimed at helping farmers of color acquire and maintain land, after decades of discrimination from the U...
Mar 25, 2021•33 min
It’s been a month since an historic winter storm hit Jackson, Mississippi, leaving tens of thousands of residents without clean water, or without any water at all. Most of those residents were Black. Four weeks later, much of the capital city still has to boil water to drink. Eighty-two percent of the residents in Jackson are Black and nearly a third live in poverty. Over the past several decades, the city has not had enough money to fix its dilapidated water system. State lawmakers, whose leade...
Mar 18, 2021•25 min
This week, jury selection began for the trial of Derek Chauvin, a former police office charged in the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis last summer. Juries hold tremendous power in our legal system. They determine who lives, who dies, and who goes free. The right to a jury of our peers is enshrined in the Constitution, guaranteeing us all the right to a “speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury.” And yet, juries in America remain overwhelmingly white, even in cases with Black victims a...
Mar 11, 2021•31 min
Black Americans have been among the hardest hit by the coronavirus, but they aren't being vaccinated at the same rates as white Americans. Black people are receiving fewer than 7 percent of total vaccine doses, despite representing more than 13 percent of the population. This gap is often based on mistrust of the medical establishment, but there is more to the story. Issues of access mean many folks who want the vaccine, can’t get it. Janice Phillips tells Trymaine Lee she has been trying to get...
Mar 04, 2021•24 min
In the final installment of Harlem on My Mind, Trymaine Lee learns about the legacy of playwright Abram Hill, who used his work to center Black characters, Black audiences, and Black communities unapologetically. Abram Hill co-founded the American Negro Theater in 1940, operating a small 150-seat theater from the basement of Harlem’s Schomburg Center. The American Negro Theater, also known as the ANT, would become a launch pad for stars like Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier, even as Hill’s nam...
Feb 25, 2021•44 min
In Part 3 of Into America’s Black History Month series, Harlem on My Mind, Trymaine Lee spotlights the influence of Jessie Redmon Fauset. Langston Hughes called her one of the midwives of the Harlem Renaissance, but few today remember her name. As literary editor for NAACP’s The Crisis magazine, Fauset fostered the careers of many notable writers of the time: poets Countee Cullen and Gwendolyn Bennet, novelist Nella Larsen, writer Claude McCay. Fauset was the first person to publish Langston Hug...
Feb 18, 2021•29 min
Into America continues its Black History Month series, Harlem on My Mind, following four figures from Harlem who defined Blackness for themselves and what it means to be Black in America today. The series begins when Trymaine Lee acquires a signed print by Jacob Lawrence titled “Schomburg Library.” The Schomburg Center for Research and Black Culture is based in Harlem, but its roots are on the island of Puerto Rico with a little Afro Puerto Rican boy named Arturo Schomburg. Determined to collect...
Feb 11, 2021•33 min
This Black History Month, Into America launches Harlem on My Mind, a series that follows four figures from Harlem who defined Blackness for themselves and what it means to be Black in America today. The story begins in December, when host Trymaine Lee acquires something he coveted for years: a numbered print titled Schomburg Library by American icon Jacob Lawrence. The print came with a handwritten dedication to a man named Abram Hill. Who was Abram Hill? How did he know Jacob Lawrence? Did thei...
Feb 04, 2021•33 min
This week, President Biden outlined his commitment to addressing racial equity and righting historical wrongs. But Black journalists have been trying to sound the alarm on the consequences of racism and extremism for years. In predominantly white newsrooms, their calls were often met with skepticism and dismissiveness, and as a result, we’ve all paid the price. Journalist Farai Chideya has covered every presidential election since 1996. Her resume includes stints at CNN, ABC News, and FiveThirty...
Jan 28, 2021•31 min
The violent insurrection against our nation’s Capitol building this month pulled an ugly truth to the surface, one that’s been hiding in plain sight for decades. White supremacist extremism is widespread, deep-rooted and a major threat to our security. In his inaugural address on Wednesday, President Joe Biden named white supremacy as a danger to our unity and vowed to defeat it. But law enforcement and government agencies have refused to acknowledge the full scope of the problem, especially whe...
Jan 21, 2021•29 min
Americans were told for months that results from the 2020 presidential election could take days, even weeks, to be confirmed. But there was little clarity on how it would all play out. For the first time in seven months, host Trymaine Lee hit the road for North Carolina, to track the Black vote in this crucial swing state. He found enthusiasm on a college campus, wary determination outside of polling places, and democracy in action as election workers gathered results in the bowels of an old cou...
Jan 15, 2021•32 min
