In the spirit of summer family reunions, we’re revisiting our episode “ Black Joy in the Summertime ” -- a conversation with William Pickens III, who grew up spending the summers in Sag Harbor Hills , one of the three small communities on Long Island, New York nicknamed the Black Hamptons. Mr. Pickens, who passed away in September 2021, talked to Trymaine Lee about the traditions and legacy of summering while Black, and the importance of a place where Black families could be themselves. (Origina...
Aug 25, 2022•33 min
The last time writer Damon Young was on Into America was back in the summer of 2020. He spoke about his New York Times op-ed, “Yeah, Let’s Not Talk About Race––Unless You Pay Me” where he talked about the awkward and sometimes inappropriate questions he was often asked about race. Well, now he is getting paid with his new advice column, “Ask Damon,” in the Washington Post where readers can ask him anything and everything. Damon, who is the author of the book “What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blac...
Aug 18, 2022•30 min
As climate change fuels an increase in natural disasters like hurricanes, wildfires, and extreme heatwaves, the threat is not evenly distributed. Black Americans are more likely to live in areas that are more flood-prone , hotter , and have worse air quality. They’re also less likely to have access to life-saving measures like air conditioning. And even though President Joe Biden’s new $369 billion climate agenda has passed the senate after Democratic Senators Joe Manchin and Kristen Sinema fina...
Aug 11, 2022•31 min
Black Americans have long been one of the most loyal voting blocs within the Democratic Party. And Historically Black Colleges and Universities have often served as an important site for Democratic campaign outreach. As the November 2022 midterm elections approach, what is this new generation of young, Black voters looking for in their elected officials and what are the issues that matter most to them? This week, Into America’s Trymaine Lee travels to Atlanta, Georgia to talk with students and r...
Aug 04, 2022•32 min
Incarcerated women have largely been left out of the conversation when it comes to abortion rights, but they are often the one who suffer the most. Prior to the overturning of Roe v. Wade pregnant people behind bars already faced limited access to abortions. And it’s Black women who bear the brunt of mass incarceration: they are imprisoned at almost twice the rate of white women. This week, Into America looks at what it means to be pregnant behind bars. We speak with Pamela Winn who founded Rest...
Jul 28, 2022•36 min
Tops Friendly Market has now re-opened in East Buffalo, two months after a white supremacist walked into the supermarket with guns blazing. Motivated by previous racist attacks and the false and insidious“ great replacement theory ,” the shooter live-streamed his killing spree, during which he took the lives of ten members of Buffalo’s Black community. The victims included parents, the elderly, a beloved community activist, and the security guard who died shooting back. Tops closed down for mont...
Jul 21, 2022•35 min
Lance Stevens was standing outside his home in his calm Indianapolis neighborhood with his mother, Kim Tillman, as she dropped off the two young grandkids from a weekend at her house, when a stranger with a gun changed their lives in an instant. Lance was shot in the leg and another bullet grazed the side of his head, while his mother received the brunt of the gunfire: she was shot in the chest and armpit, and her arm and cheekbone were shattered. After decades of decline, gun violence has spike...
Jul 14, 2022•41 min
There’s a prevailing narrative within our society when it comes to Black men, one which was spelled out in detail more than fifty years ago, but which continues to sit right at home in our country’s family of stereotypes about Blackness. The narrative goes that Black men don’t stick around to parent the children we father. Shaka Senghor is out to change that narrative. His most recent book, Letters to the Sons of Society , is written as a collection of letters to his own two sons, born twenty ye...
Jul 07, 2022•29 min
“Freaknik in many ways is what Woodstock was for white people,” explains Dr. Maurice Hobson. Hobson is an historian at Georgia State University and former Freaknik attendee. Freaknik was a legendary street party that started in Atlanta back in the early 80s. For more than 15 years, young Black people from all around the country flooded the parks and streets of Atlanta every third weekend in April. There was dancing in the middle of the streets, step shows, and concerts with rap stars like Outkas...
Jun 30, 2022•38 min
Selma, Alabama was at the heart of the Civil Rights Movement. It was here in 1965 that Black protesters were chased and beaten during a march that would become known as Bloody Sunday . And today, that fight for Black liberation continues in Selma with Quentin Bell, the executive director of the Knights and Orchids Society , a nonprofit group that supports Black queer people who are facing housing insecurity, healthcare needs, and discrimination . Quentin has been an LGBTQ+ advocate for more than...
Jun 23, 2022•44 min
More than ten years ago , Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black teen, was fatally shot in a gated neighborhood in Florida while on his way back to their home from a local convenience store. Martin's death -- and his shooter's acquittal -- would go on to spark a new generation of protests and global attention on police and citizen violence against Black people. In the wake of this renewed energy around anti-Black racism, a coalition of racial justice organizations like The Black Lives Matter Network, ...
Jun 16, 2022•23 min
Before he was Big Daddy Kane, the legendary MC who broke out big in the late 80s, he was just Antonio Hardy, the kid from Brooklyn who heard something new coming out of the turntables at the block party. It was the sound of hip-hop coming of age, and Kane was coming up with it. Soon, he’d be writing his own rhymes and traveling to other boroughs to battle their best MCs. Big Daddy Kane would go on to become one of the most versatile rappers of his day, with hits like “ Ain’t No Half-Steppin ,’” ...
Jun 09, 2022•30 min
What can we do when the weight of the world becomes too heavy? Amid a gun violence epidemic that’s ravaging communities across the US, attacks on American history curriculums in classrooms, and failures from elected officials to protect voting and abortion rights , American democracy is in crisis. But Michael McBride , a pastor and community organizer, is showing us what a practice of persistence during times of despair can look like. With more than 20 years in ministry, McBride bridges the chur...
Jun 02, 2022•37 min
Where does the video of George Floyd’s murder fit into the long history of the push for racial justice? Journalist and professor Marc Lamont Hill has just released a new book, co-authored with historian Todd Brewster . Titled Seen & Unseen , the work explores the ways in which technology and visual media have shaped our understanding of race in the past and how they are being used as tools in the fight for racial justice today. The impetus for Hill and Brewster’s book was the murder of George Fl...
May 26, 2022•33 min
On Saturday, May 14, a white 18-year-old drove to a supermarket in a Black neighborhood in Buffalo, N.Y., and killed ten people in a racist attack. The gunman was alone, and reporting has revealed that he allegedly posted a manifesto with racist theories and his plans to kill Black people online. Law enforcement officials and the media often describe these kinds of perpetrator as lone wolves. But the work of white supremacy is never lonely. It’s propagated by social media, cable television pundi...
May 19, 2022•31 min
It’s been almost ten years since the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the killing Trayvon Martin, sparked the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter in 2013. A year later, the police killing of Michael Brown turned the hashtag into a movement. Then in 2020, the world witnessed the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd, and Black Lives Matter exploded into a global phenomenon. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to protest, and as activists took center stage, people donated...
May 12, 2022•52 min
This week marks the 30th anniversary of the 1992 Los Angeles Riots , also known as the LA Uprising. Before the uprising, tensions in South L.A. were at an all-time high from years of untamed police abuse, gang violence, and strained relations between the Black and Korean American communities. In 1991, a Black teenager named Latasha Harlins was shot and killed by Korean storekeeper Soon Ja Du after she accused Harlins of stealing a bottle of juice. Around the same time, the Black community was al...
May 05, 2022•34 min
According to a draft Supreme Court opinion obtained by Politico , the Supreme Court stands poised to overturn Roe v. Wade during its next session. If this happens, it’s estimated as many as 23 states will enact some type of abortion ban, some of which will go into effect almost immediately . And Black people could be hardest hit. Black women seek abortions at a higher rate than any other group. And that, coupled with the knowledge that infant and maternal mortality rates are higher for Black peo...
May 04, 2022•36 min
Harvard University is confronting its ties to slavery in a new way. In a sweeping report published this week, the university detailed how the school profited from slavery and acknowledged that more than 70 people were enslaved by Harvard leaders, faculty, and staff between 1636 and 1783 when the state of Massachusetts outlawed the practice. Last year, Into America explored whether the school understood the nuances of Blackness within its student body, because even though Harvard is one of the Bl...
Apr 29, 2022•38 min
Jean-Michel Basquiat was an iconic American artist who rose to fame in the downtown New York City cultural scene of the late 1970s and early 80s. By 18-years-old, Basquiat had already begun spray-painting tantalizing texts on the walls of lower Manhattan under the pseudonym SAMO. In the years to come, Basquiat would transition from street tagger to gallery artist, taking the world by storm. Today, Basquiat’s legacy looms over us, larger than ever. His images and symbols grace Uniqlo t-shirts and...
Apr 28, 2022•40 min
Down on Louisiana’s Gulf Coast, there is a small, close-knit Black community named Pointe à La Hache. There, oyster harvesting is a culture and a heritage that has been passed down for generations. But decades of storms, natural disasters, oil spills, and racist policies have threatened this way of life. Now, the state’s coastal restoration plans could end it. According to experts, Louisiana loses more than a football field of its jagged coastline every 100 minutes. This leaves coastal communiti...
Apr 21, 2022•37 min
The racial wealth gap in this country between Black and white Americans is vast. Centuries of violent theft and racist policies mean that white families have, on average, eight times the wealth of Black families. But a sizeable number of people, like Lamar Wilson , the founder of Black Bitcoin Billionaires , say there’s a new way to help close this gap: cryptocurrency. There are even cryptocurrencies made by Black people to benefit the Black community, like Guapcoin , run by technologist Tavonia...
Apr 14, 2022•39 min
Emmett Till’s lynching is credited as the spark that set off the Civil Rights Movement. In 1955, the 14-year-old boy was visiting family in Mississippi when he was kidnapped and murdered for whistling at a white woman. Days later his bloated body was dragged out of the Tallahatchie River and sent home to his mother, Mamie Till Mobley , in Chicago. When pictures of his mutilated face were published around the country, it shocked the national consciousness, bringing people off the sideline s and i...
Apr 07, 2022•33 min
This past weekend’s Oscars ceremony was one for the history books. There was, of course, the smack seen around the world . But beyond the most salacious headline of the night one fact stood out: this was the Blackest Oscars ceremony the world has ever seen. Two of the night’s three hosts – comedian Wanda Sykes and actress Regina Hall – were Black women. All the young people handing the winners their trophies were HBCU students. And for the first time in its history, the show was produced by an a...
Apr 01, 2022•30 min
During the 2022 Oscars’ ceremony, Will Smith shocked the world. Smith strode onstage and smacked Chris Rock, after the comedian made a joke about Smith’s wife, actress Jada Pinkett Smith. Smith went on to win the Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of Venus and Serena Williams’s father in King Richard , and later in the night he and Rock reportedly made amends . When Smith was announced as the winner of the Oscar for Best Actor the audience gave him a standing ovation as he approached the stage. ...
Mar 31, 2022•31 min
For the better part of a decade Kanye West and Kim Kardashian were one of the most influential couples in pop culture, living their private lives in the public eye. And now that the pair is officially split, they continue to grab headlines . When Kim filed for divorce in February of last year, things at first seemed amicable – in August the couple recreated their wedding on stage at one of Kanye’s concerts, and they continue to share parenting responsibilities for their four children. But Kanye ...
Mar 24, 2022•38 min
As Russian forces advanced from the east during the war in Ukraine , they faced unexpectedly fierce opposition from the Ukrainian military and civilian population. And as fighting intensified, many in its path fled west. But as people fled, not everyone was the given the same opportunity to seek refuge. In the middle of a war zone anti-Black racism reared its ugly head, with reports of people from the African diaspora facing racist treatment at the Ukrainian border. In the eastern city of Sumy, ...
Mar 17, 2022•31 min
In March of 2019, Morgan Cooper dropped a video on YouTube that quickly went viral. It was a short film that he made as a passion project, after he was struck with a flash of inspiration: What if the 90’s classic The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air were updated for the 21st century? Within 24 hours of posting his project online, Cooper got a call from Westbrook, the production company owned by Will and Jada Pinkett-Smith. Will Smith had seen the video, liked what he saw, and wanted to know what Cooper’s...
Mar 10, 2022•48 min
During the Democratic primary of 2020, then-candidate Joe Biden made a historic pledge: given the opportunity, he would nominate the first Black woman to the Supreme Court. With the announcement of Justice Stephen Breyer’s retirement earlier this year, President Biden had an opportunity to fulfill that pledge. And he delivered. After weeks of speculation in the media, and comments from the right, Biden announced Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson as his pick. Before a candidate was even named, members ...
Mar 03, 2022•33 min
Trayvon Martin’s hoodie was never supposed to end up in an exhibit on Reconstruction at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture . But then the 17-year-old boy was shot and killed in Sanford, Florida, by a self-appointed neighborhood watch captain, while carrying nothing but a cell phone, a pack of Skittles, and a can of iced tea. Kidada Williams , a history professor at Wayne State University tells Trymaine Lee that she sees a clear through line between Reconstr...
Feb 24, 2022•55 min
