Category: Race

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Women at a memorial outside the Gold Spa in Atlanta, where three Korean women were shot and killed on Tuesday. Credit: Chang W. Lee - "The New York Times"

The Deep American Roots of the Atlanta Shooting

Among the first things I did upon learning about the shootings at three massage parlors in the Atlanta area was to check in with a former massage parlor worker I met in 2019. At the time, I was reporting an article about a prostitution raid at a Florida massage parlor.

Three elderly residents of Lemington Home for the Aged in the 1940s.

The Death of a Black Nursing Home

PITTSBURGH, Penn.–Elaine Carrington moved into the Lemington Home for the Aged in Pittsburgh in November 2004. She died three weeks later of a blood clot in her lungs. An investigation by the state found that the staff had failed to give Carrington any of her

A view of Cape Town. Image by J. Lester Feder/Buzzfeed

South Africa’s Same-Sex Marriages Don’t Always Have A Happy Ending

When the reigning Mr. Gay Namibia married his Botswanan partner in South Africa in April 2013, Zimbabwe’s ZimEye.org declared, “History [made] as Africa witnesses second gay wedding.” The first, said the website, happened a week earlier when two men married in a Zulu ceremony in

The Work of a Pullman Porter

A Pullman porter was, before anything, a man who made beds. Or, as they said, made down beds, since the most taxing part was popping the upper berth from the ceiling. The lower was formed by folding down opposing seats, fastening curtains, affixing the headboard,

Choosing Servility To Staff America’s Trains

He was a black man in a white jacket and sable hat. He only recently had stepped out of the cotton fields, and now was stepping onto one of the locomotives that had symbolized freedom to slavehands like him. He lit the candles that illuminated

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Refugee Foster Care in Mississippi — When Cultures and People Clash

Refugee Foster Care in Mississippi — When Cultures and People Clash (Note: The names of the Sudanese youth in foster care were changed because of foster care privacy rules.) It was a simple misunderstanding. The article in the small Catholic Diocesan newsletter in Jackson, MS.,

Haitian-American Politics in Chicago

CHICAGO – A lazy, humid afternoon in the Windy City. Unity Radio is on the air. The topic? Politics. The opinions? Endless. Today’s subject is the controversial presidential elections of last fall. The amateur commentators trade political views like sports announcers rattling off the minutia

Family reunion at the Havana airport, Cuba.

The ‘Special Period’ In Cuba

Text and photos by Ernesto Bazan In November of 1992, I made my first trip to Cuba. I had bought a super cheap tourist package in Merida, in the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico. It was $350 for a flight and a week’s worth of food

Victor Logan, "Stinga" displays an award recognizing his efforts to uphold the 1995 gang truce and to better himself through the Conscious Youth Development Program. It reads: CYDP 2nd Aniversary of the Bird’s Isle Declaration recognizes Victor Logan for resolving to change in spite of the odds. February 16, 1997. Photo by Donna DeCesare

Struggling to Change in Spite of the Odds

Belize City, Belize–”Stinga,” is a Conscious Youth success story. The former head of the Black Scorpion Posse, BSP, is one of the original gang leaders, who signed a historic truce halting gun battles on Belize City streets. Stinga surveys his muddy surroundings before venturing from

A woman walks on the U.S. side of the border as smoke pours over the wall from Nogales, Sonora. The smoke smelled of burning plastic. Photos by Jeffry D. Scott

Bridging Troubled Waters in Ambos Nogales

In the hillside shantytowns of Nogales, Sonora, Mexico, people get drinking water from trucks and store it in barrels salvaged from the dump or nearby factories. They have no choice. The city’s crumbling, 50-year-old water distribution system doesn’t extend to where they live. Even most

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Benazir Bhutto: Comeback Kid?

Note: The pictures for this story are copyrighted and not available for web publication. Benazir Bhutto, world-class political pugilist, is refusing to go down for the count. For over a year now, this twice-elected, twice-deposed ex-prime minister of Pakistan, has seemed to be on the

Sonia, a young Los Angeles girt, wears a memorial T-shirt from her brother Ulises’ gang funeral. A local Mara Salvatrucha gang member raises the lid of the coffin he was sanding to strike a pose of respect to the memory of his dead homeboy. Photo by APF Fellow Donna Decesare

Avenging Angels: Homegirl Survival Stories

Text and photos by Donna DeCesare “The weak one is the one society thinks is good, but that’s the one that is going to end up dead.” –Angel, Latina gang member “Trippy” from Mara Salvatrucha getting a new tattoo. Photo by APF Fellow Donna Decesare

Against the backdrop of war ruins, a young widow — one of the thousands in Abkhazia — waits for a bus in Sukhumi, the capital of the self-proclaimed republic. With public transport scarce, the wait can stretch to an hour. Much of the city center, once lined with palms and oleander, now lies in rubble. Although the fighting ended four years ago, thanks to the post-war economic free-fall, few of the many ruined buildings have been restored.

Report from Abkhazia

By Andrew Meier with photos by Mia Foster SUKHUMI — One afternoon not long ago in the beleaguered capital of Abkhazia, a tiny self-proclaimed republic on the Black Sea, its reigning satrap, Vladislav Ardzinba, paced his spartan office, nervously awaiting a call from Moscow. On

Russian peacekeepers line up for lunch at the Transdnestria border. Since the 1992 conflict subsided, in addition to Russia's reconstituted 14th Army based in Tiraspol, Russian and Moldovan soldiers have kept a joint watch on the border zone.

Independence Free Fall: The Collapse of Moldova’s Industrial Engine

Story by Andrew Meier with photographs by Mia Foster Tiraspol may be the bleakest of cities in the former Soviet Union. A gray town of some 50,000 beleaguered souls, it has not witnessed the destruction visited upon the Chechen capital, Crozny, nor the chromosomal damage

Miguel Tejada, of the Class A Modesto Athletics, stretches before a game, his teammates in the background. An amazing defensive shortstop, Tejada also shows great power at the plate. It is early in the 1996 season and he is showing the confidence of a player on the way up.

The Prospect

By Marcos Bretón with photos by José Luis Villegas CERES, CA. – Ninety acres of Stanislaus County alfalfa swayed in the late summer breeze as four shirtless young Dominican men walked in bare feet to the field’s edge. With three carrying kitchen chairs and another

Two Azeri girls are displaced persons following the war.

The Spoils of War: Report From Nagorno-Karabakh

Story by Andrew Meier with photos by Jacqueline Mia Foster You’ve won the war, now win the peace.” The words come to me from an old hand in the tangled politics of the Caucasus. We are sitting in a well-appointed foreign embassy in the capitol

A schoolgirl photograph of Shirley Ann Davidson at age 15, in 1967.

Integration’s Victims: When Virginia Slammed the School Doors Shut

Six-year-old Shirley Ann Davidson had looked forward to starting school for a long time. Her mother had prepared her well, giving her the basics of arithmetic and reading from a Dick-and-Jane book to teach her the alphabet. During the summer before Shirley was scheduled to

The plaque at the old high school in Summerton, S.C. states, with no irony, "Together Let us Sweetly Live."

Education’s Cast-Offs: How Whites Avoid Integration and Leave Blacks Adrift

SUMMERTON, South Carolina – The orange-and-blue cover on the yearbook at Scott’s Branch High School here proclaims this sleepy Southern town as “the birth place of equal education,” but a look inside the town’s gleaming new $8 million school building belies that promise. Scott’s Branch,