By Curtis Stephen Twenty-nineteen (2019). It truly was The Last Year. And that’s because in our last decade, we marked the 50th anniversary of something or other from the 1960s. The assassinations of JFK, MLK and RFK. The moon landing. The...
By Curtis Stephen My elder brother, Mervyn, had a knack for posing heavy questions. He once asked me whether I ever thought about a day — perhaps a century from now — in which just a handful of people could actually say that we...
By Curtis Stephen If I am an advocate for anything, it is to move. As far as you can, as much as you can. Across the ocean, or simply across the river.
By Curtis Stephen Inside a gritty Brooklyn public housing facility nearly 20 years ago, New York veteran TV news reporter Sarah Wallace was firmly trying to convince a moody ruffian named Nicky Roper to step out of the shadows. And she was doing...
For Clive Campbell, better known as the legendary hip-hop pioneer DJ Kool Herc, the memory of what he witnessed on the chaotic streets of New York one steamy night in July 1977 remains all too fresh. After playing at a Police Athletic League...
With grace, beauty and prodigious talent, Ruby Dee – born in Cleveland and reared in Harlem – had, by December 1969, built the sort of résumé that most actresses in Hollywood, regardless of race, could only dream of. Whether it was Broadway...
This is the day that Harry Carson, 59, knew was coming. He’s a former NFL linebacker who, for 13 seasons, pummeled opposing quarterbacks as part of a storied defensive line for the New York Giants, earning a 1986 Super Bowl title along the...
When Ce’Cile Charlton arrived to Jamaica’s dancehall reggae scene in 2001 with her buzzworthy single “Changez,” she was instantly cast as the genre’s latest bad gyal – a term which has since become her alter ego. Her tune, a...
By the fall of 2011, anti-death penalty advocates chanted the now-familiar refrains – “I Am Troy Davis” and “Too Much Doubt” – as they rallied around Davis, a Georgia man who was on death row in the 1989 murder of off-duty police officer Mark...
This story was published in the fall 2011 issue of The Crisis magazine. In 1989, Troy Davis worked at a construction site and dreamed of joining the Marine Corps. Today he is on death row for being the triggerman in the fatal shooting of off-duty...
In the disco world of 1979, one of the standout, chart-topping blockbusters was “Ladies Night” by the legendary funk/soul band Kool & The Gang. And now, for the photographer Laylah Amatullah Barrayn – who was born in Brooklyn that...
The following article was published in February 1998 when I was a student at Long Island University’s Brooklyn Campus. This story appeared in Seawanhaka, the university’s student-run newspaper, where I served as senior news editor. In...
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