(ThyBlackMan.com) Michael B. Jordan just took things to another level, winning his first Oscar for Sinners and reminding folks that this rise did not happen overnight. From his early days on The Wire to standout roles in Fruitvale Station, Black Panther, and the Creed films, he has put together the ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) Last night I had dinner with King Solomon and he told me in Proverbs 14:12 “There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.” He then asked me if I had heard about the big announcement recently made by ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) Every career begins with a defining moment, an instant when preparation meets courage and the future quietly changes course. For me, that moment came in 1983, when, at just 21 years old, I brought Richard Pryor to speak before more than 1,500 employees at the U.S. Department of Agriculture ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) I am built differently. Cats of my generation are built differently, too. We came out of the mud, with no seatbelts required in cars and no helmets required to ride a bike. We were the four-square, stickball, and marble-playing generation, where every boy took a spinning top to class each ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) When Phyllis Hyman sang “You Know How to Love Me,” it was more than just a declaration. Released at the dawn of a new decade, the 1979 track captured something rare: a fluency of feeling that was confident, vulnerable, and electric. The song peaked at number six on the ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) Jay-Z stands in a rare place in American cultural history. He is not simply a rapper who became wealthy. He is a chronicler of ambition, survival, capitalism, and the psychology of coming from nothing and refusing to stay there. When I look at his words as a like-minded writer, ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) White People Created Jazz is a claim that resurfaces whenever cultural memory becomes inconvenient. It is often framed as a bold correction to political correctness, yet it collapses the moment it encounters history, geography, and lived testimony. Jazz is not an abstract idea whose origin is lost in time. ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) As this reflection is written, Wynton Marsalis stands at a rare threshold in American cultural life. After nearly forty years, he is preparing to step down as founder and artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, the institution he helped build into a permanent home for jazz inside one ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) For many Black Americans, Muhammad Ali was never just a boxer. He was a warning, a lesson, a mirror, and in many ways, a permission slip. He gave voice to thoughts many of our parents and grandparents carried quietly in their chests. He stood in public the way a ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) Hip hop has always been political whether it wanted to be or not. From its earliest days in the Bronx, the culture spoke truth to power, chronicled poverty, resisted authority, and gave voice to communities ignored by mainstream America. Even when the music leaned toward escapism, the backdrop was ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) In your mind, you may be thinking, what book have I read that spawned me to think about to write on what I am about to print? What can I say? With that stated, the decades-old allegations of welfare fraud by immigrant Somali communities across the nation, in concert ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) Richard Smallwood was more than a gospel musician. He was a theologian at the piano, a composer who fused classical training with Black church tradition, and a writer whose lyrics carried the weight of Scripture and lived experience. His music did not aim to entertain first. It aimed to ...