Editor’s Note: This article contains words that are racist and may be upsetting. “…if I could somehow re-create the fatal whiteness of that light…then you would believe…” Tim O’Brien. This is true. All of it. I was invited to read my poetry at a Christian college in the US Midwest. Someone had encountered my […]
MAYDAY:Black
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How to Tell a Pure Rage Story
N. K. Jemisin on H. P. Lovecraft: Deconstructing the Original Boogeyman
Note: This article displays a poem credited to H. P. Lovecraft. The poem contains a word that is racist and offensive in its context. Howard Phillips Lovecraft has been dead for over eighty years, but his influence on supernatural horror fiction is well documented, and respected in most literary circles today. Since his death, he’s […]
Yes, Yes, Y’all! — and It Don’t Stop
This story is the inaugural product of the MAYDAY:Black Incubator. On an August night, sealed with frizzy edges and afro pick salutes, fingers caress vinyl darker than the night sky. From that moment, Black American culture orbited turntables in a South Bronx neighborhood, and young hip-hop grew to become a bold storyteller and an agent […]
50Years Later, the Demands of ‘The Black Manifesto’ Are Still Unmet
by Carla Bell
This story, first published at Electric Literature in 2020, is among its “Favorite Essays About Radicalism and Resistance.” One Sunday in the spring of 1969, James Forman walked into the sanctuary of Riverside Church in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, barreled his way to the pulpit, commandeered the microphone, and before many wide-eyed and […]
Holding Myself Together
“Your skills are not what we need at this time.” Five years ago, my boss, Laura, not her real name, terminated my employment with these words. Face-to-face in an office the size of a coat closet, sat this middle-aged white woman, Chief Development Officer at the foundation, and I, former Director of Cause Marketing and […]
Sons of The Confederacy 2.0: Not Just a Few Bad Apples
Finally, after one of the most suspenseful and unnerving elections of my lifetime, the United States Congress was poised on Wednesday, January 6, 2021, to certify Electoral College votes, a long-held ceremonial element of every incoming presidential cabinet. Instead, mayhem descended on the capital city, and Congress itself, as a mob of Trump supporters laid […]
(Still) Separate and Unequal in Boston Schools
For African American and Latinos, there are two pandemics. One, viral. The other, academic. In communities of color, students are being attacked on two fronts. Just as African American and Latino populations are at greater risk of contracting COVID-19 as compared to Whites and Asians, the former set lacks sustained support and advocacy in reading […]
“The Sores of War” and the Surprising Legacy of Robert E. Lee
“…to separate and destroy families and friends… to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors, and to devastate the fair face of this beautiful world” – Confederate General Robert E. Lee, excerpt from a letter to his wife (1862) History remembers Confederate Army General Robert Edward Lee and his defeat […]
Margaret Sanger and Me: (F)actual History and Its Plan for the “Fit” and the “Feeble”
What was Important to Me Then What was important to me back then was happy hour and high heels, Dooney & Burke, free entry at the club before ten, office hook-ups and rumors of office hook-ups, my hair, my money, and my time. I was twenty-nine years old and a paralegal in the premiere intellectual […]