Christmas is upon us, and I glide through the capitalist frenzy and social anxiety with frictionless insouciance. I buy no Christmas...

HUMAN NATURE OR AFRICAN DEPRAVITY? It’s all depressingly familiar: an artificially cobbled state created under colonialism explodes in...

Lady Hamlet and her humans, 1961 It wasn’t easy for a dog used to the freedom of the San Gabriel Mountains to accommodate herself to the...

Nous quatre a Paris Jazz paved the way for the establishment of an African American expatriate community in Paris. The French were blown...

Ethiopian Jews Airlifted to Israel During the height of King Solomon’s reign of glory, o Best Beloved!, the dark-skinned Queen of Sheba,...

The young ulpanist in the rose greenhouse.   Aliyah. In its Biblical context, “aliyah” is a Hebrew word meaning “to rise up” and...

The Commandment Keepers of Harlem    First of all, they’re not Jews – at least not as understood by Jewish consensus. (Jews are either...

Four Jews The closest equivalent we have to the N-word as an ethnic slur is “kike,” which, while certainly meant to be wounding and...

The closest equivalent we have to the N-word as an ethnic slur is “kike,” which, while certainly meant to be wounding and offensive,...

Garvey handcuffed to U.S. Marshal on his way to prison.  Marcus Garvey was, without question, one of the most consequential and...

Alain Locke’s claim to immortality rightly rests on his epochal 1925 anthology, “The New Negro” and midwifing the first generation of...

Folsom Street Fair 2019 --- not bad for 69  Way back in 1981, I was living in Washington, DC, with my first lover. I was only three years...

Of the many visual artists born at the turn of the last century who came of age during the Harlem Renaissance, only one has been pegged...

In 1954, Jean Guyard, a Frenchman working as a civil servant in the tax department of the French Republic, married my cousin Marion...

We want poems like fists beating niggers out of Jocks or dagger poems in the slimy bellies of the owner-jews. These lines, published in a...

I'm a poet And my feet know it. They’re longfellas. This sophomoric ditty illustrates the dilemma of a poetic practice which cuts...

In 1950, the superstar singer and actor Ethel Waters checked off another box in her list of African American firsts when she starred in a...

Doris and Alice enjoy a Footsie Wootsie at the San Joanquin County Fair  In 1954, at seventeen, Doris Hale started living with my family...

In 1931, James P. Johnson wrote and recorded a song, "Go Harlem," extolling the extraordinary life of New York's Black Mecca. Among the...

Me and Ebrahim Hussein  In the spring of 1994, I published a commentary in Research in African Literatures , "the premiere journal of...