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...

In the fall of 1922, two young American writers, Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank, traveled together to Spartanburg, South Carolina, for...

Some of the staff of Hage Geingob High School. Guess which one is the Coloured. First of all, note the British spelling. Second of all,...

When We Were Victims: The Blood Libel It's safe to say, I think, that Jews have never been well regarded, especially in Christian and...

The raffish director strikes a casual pose in front of the Queens Film Festival banner Grey Gardens , if you must know. And if you don't...

Once upon a time, in an America far, far away lived two pariah peoples in a land that the Anglo-Saxon ruling class considered as theirs...

As a mid-century Jewish American child, I was enrolled in the Zionist project without my knowledge or acquiescence. I was born in 1950,...

October is LGBT History Month, and so we should remember the Pansy Craze of the early 1930s, one of the few bright spots of pre-Stonewall...

When I was coming out in the Stone Age of the 1980s, drag was not well understood (at least by me) or widely accepted, even in the gay...

One blanket statement we can endorse about American Jewish boys and men is that we are neurotically attached to our mothers. Since our...

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