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 […]
Carla Bell
CARLA BELL, Director of MAYDAY:Black, is a journalist and editorial consultant with bylines at WHYY, Ebony and Essence magazines, Electric Literature, The North Star, first established by Frederick Douglass in 1847, reestablished by Shaun King in 2019, and many others.
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 […]
Race Against Time: How White Fear of Genetic Annihilation Fuels Abortion Bans
by Carla Bell
Still, in the foreseeable future the country will be, as Elliot puts it, “mostly brown.”
“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 […]
