Twenty Years Gone

Back in high school, one of my favorite Led Zeppelin songs was “Ten Years Gone” from the Physical Graffiti album. It was a melancholy sort of song, and I did melancholy really well as a teenager. With Robert Plant’s pensive lyrics about days gone by and Jimmy Page’s layer upon layer of forlorn guitar, it was a [...]

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Still Divided by Faith (plus, a hope that sustains)

I was buried in a writing project when the CNN special Black in America first aired a couple weeks back, so I missed writing about it then. I caught it in bits and pieces. If anyone out there has comments or reviews they’d like to share here, please do. Related to that special, CNN.com has [...]

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Rebel Songs

Ever lose track of time while you’re reminiscing on YouTube? Sometimes the endless videos on there send me traveling down Memory Lane for longer than I care to admit. Let’s just say I could probably be using my time more wisely. The thing is, I have all these music memories from the ’70s and ’80s—amazing [...]

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The Jeremiah Wright Interview

Watching Bill Moyers’s interview with Jeremiah Wright last night on PBS, I wondered if the media would latch on to sound bites from this broadcast the way they did the snippets from those now-infamous sermons that established Wright as an anti-American nut job. Of course, without Wright we wouldn’t have gotten Barack Obama’s brilliant Philadelphia [...]

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When Jesse Was King

 
The Root just posted a thoughtful piece on the diminished relevance of Jesse Jackson. The writer, Marjorie Valbrun, ponders the fact that, though Jackson was present on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel during Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder, he was strangely absent from the media’s recent commemoration of the 40th anniversary of King’s death. “Perhaps it [...]

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Did the Prosperity Gospel Win?

As part of its commemoration of the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s death, CNN.com posted an interesting story about a shift in the “black church” since the days of King. The article, by John Blake, kicks off with this tantalizing lede:
The contemporary white church has largely accepted King as a religious hero. Yet [...]

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40 Years After MLK

   
There will be no shortage of Martin Luther King Jr. coverage in the media this week, as we mark the 40th anniversary of his tragic death. If you’ve read, watched, or listened to anything in particular that you’d like to bring to the attention of others, or if there’s some upcoming programming that you’re aware [...]

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