(ThyBlackMan.com) Tuskegee University announced this month that bonnets, do-rags, and bedroom shoes will no longer be permitted in its classrooms and cafeteria, and the fuss that followed says more about us than any scrap of cloth ever could. Give me a minute with that, because the noise came fast and ...

(ThyBlackMan.com) American memory rarely allows complicated men to stay complicated, and few figures in our history have been flattened more thoroughly than the founding principal of Tuskegee Institute. I came up hearing two versions of Booker T. Washington, and neither one sounded like a human being. In my grandmother’s front ...

(ThyBlackMan.com) The most persistent weakness in our political tradition is no shortage of talent or courage, but a habit of waiting on one anointed figure to carry an entire race across the finish line. I have been voting since Carter, and I have watched this cycle spin around more times ...

(ThyBlackMan.com) In more than a few years of watching how power actually moves in this country, I have seen ambitious men mistake a full bank account for real influence, and the rapper Boosie Badazz has now paid dearly to learn the difference. The Baton Rouge rapper, whose legal name is ...

(ThyBlackMan.com) On the nineteenth of June, on Juneteenth of all days, the doors of the Obama Presidential Center swung open to the public in Jackson Park on the South Side of Chicago. Eight stories. Nineteen acres. A library branch, a basketball court, gardens and a great lawn. Eight hundred and ...

(ThyBlackMan.com) Sit in any barbershop long enough and you will hear a young man’s whole character decided over the hum of the clippers. Russell Wilson got decided in mine years back, and the ruling came down the same every time somebody said his name. Soft. Too polished, too churchy, grinning ...

(ThyBlackMan.com) There’s a way of measuring a leader that never shows up in the ledgers. Not in the bills passed or the votes counted. I’m talking about bearing. The thing that comes out of a person when the floor drops out from under a whole country and everybody turns at ...

(ThyBlackMan.com) My grandmother kept receipts. Not only the paper kind, though a shoebox of those sat beneath her bed. The ones that counted she kept in memory, in the long private ledger a person compiles after a lifetime of learning whether the world means to deal fairly. The grocer who ...