Let me tell you what got me thinking about it again. I was in the break room at work a few weeks back, standing there waiting on the microwave, and a younger brother at the table hadn’t looked up from his phone since he sat down. Thumb moving. Thumb moving. Every few seconds his face changed a little. Something funny, then something that irritated him, then something that got him hyped, then a clip of some guy in a podcast studio explaining what women want, what the government is hiding, and why the market is going to crash by Friday. Whole lunch hour, gone like that. When he finally opened his mouth, he told the room exactly what was wrong with the economy, and he said it the way a man says something he’s studied. He hadn’t studied a thing. He’d been fed.

Now I’m not about to sit here acting holy, because I’ve been him. I’ve killed entire evenings on my phone while a stack of hardcovers sat on the nightstand collecting dust and quiet judgment. That’s the trap right there. It doesn’t feel like laziness. It feels like being plugged in. You close the app convinced you learned something, when really you just swallowed a hundred pieces of other men’s conclusions without ever seeing how they got there.

Here’s the difference nobody bothers to explain to us. Your feed will tell you what happened. Tells you fast, tells you loud, wraps it in music and a stitched reaction and big bold letters across the screen. What it almost never gives you is why. Nobody in your timeline sits you down and explains how the neighborhood your granddaddy bought into is suddenly worth four times what he paid, while his grandson can’t get approved two streets over. Nobody walks you through how the same policy comes back around under a new name every twenty years, or how a man works steady for thirty of them and still retires with nothing. That kind of answer doesn’t fit in fifteen seconds. It lives in chapters. It lives in the long boring middle that makes you set the thing down and stare at the ceiling awhile.

The staring at the ceiling is the whole point.

Attention works a lot like a muscle, and most of us haven’t trained ours since high school. I know brothers who can bench two twenty five and can’t sit with one argument for thirty straight minutes. We’re strong everywhere except the one place somebody’s actively working to take advantage of us.

Because that’s what this really comes down to. Not culture. Not being fancy or respectable. Money, power, and who gets to tell you what’s real.

Ask yourself who profits when you can’t concentrate. The predatory lender does. So does the finance office at the dealership, every time a man signs paperwork he only skimmed. That crypto boy in your DMs with the rented Lambo is counting on it. So is the politician who needs your anger this season and your silence the next. Throw in the influencer selling a mindset course while you’re at it. Every last one of them wants the same thing out of you, which is a reaction instead of an examination. A man who’s used to sitting with hard text gets a lot harder to work. He starts catching it when an argument’s got nothing underneath it, and after a while he can hear the difference between somebody who knows a thing and somebody who’s just performing knowing. That doesn’t come from watching more clips. It comes from pages.

Now let me say the part that stops most brothers before they ever start.

Nobody’s asking you to knock out fifty books this year. All that challenge talk is fine for folks who already love the habit, but for a working man with kids, a commute, a side hustle, and a body that hurts in three new places, a goal that big is just failure with a calendar attached. I’ve watched grown men buy a beautiful hardcover, get eleven pages in, feel guilty about it for two months, then start avoiding the whole subject like it owed them money.

So make the bar low enough that quitting would embarrass you.

Ten pages a day. That’s it. Ten while the coffee brews, or in the truck before you clock in, or in the fifteen quiet minutes after the house finally settles. Ten a day adds up to 3,650 pages a year, which could land you somewhere between ten and seventeen books depending on what you choose, without ever once feeling heroic about it.

Can’t sit still? Run audio. Some brothers turn their nose up at that and I think they’re being silly. Your commute is dead time. So’s the treadmill, so’s cutting the grass. Fill it. I’ve gotten through more history in traffic than I ever did in a recliner, and nobody’s grading you on posture.

And if even that’s too much where you are right now, then give yourself one every two months. Six a year. Six ain’t nothing. Six good ones, picked on purpose, will carry a man further than three hundred hours of scrolling ever could.

Now, what to pick, and this is where we overthink it worse than anywhere else.

It doesn’t have to be heavy. Nobody said your first one in fifteen years has to be political theory. Start where your interest already lives. If music’s your thing, there are whole volumes about the men who built the sound you came up on and the money that got taken from them. If it’s ball, read about the leagues before the leagues, or the front office moves that shaped the team you’ve been hollering at since you were twelve. Cars, war, cooking, boxing, the church, science fiction, whatever it is. Somebody wrote a serious one about the thing you already talk about for hours.

The subject isn’t the point at first. The stamina is. You’re proving to yourself that you can hold a long thought without your hand crawling toward your pocket, and any decent title will teach you that much.

Once you’ve got the habit though, here are four I’d hand my own son, my nephews, and about half the men I came up with.

Start with The Autobiography of Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley. Everybody thinks they know this one because they’ve seen the poster and heard the quotes. Very few have actually sat with it. What’s inside isn’t a slogan. It’s a man remaking himself over and over, teaching himself to think in a prison library with a dictionary, and then finding the nerve to change his mind out loud at the exact moment it cost him the most. That last part is the lesson. Certainty is cheap. Revision takes spine.

Next, Black Boy by Richard Wright. Hard reading, in the best way. Wright shows you what it does to a young man’s insides when the world keeps insisting he stay small, and what it costs him to refuse. There’s a hunger in that memoir that goes way past food. I came to it late, in my thirties, and I was angry for a week after. Good. Some anger clarifies things.

Both of those, by the way, appear on the Schomburg Center’s 2026 100 Black Voices Centennial Reading List, sitting alongside fiction, memoirs, poetry, political history, and other work about Black life. That matters. It tells you these aren’t sentimental picks. They’re load bearing.

From there, get your history straight with Black AF History: The Un Whitewashed Story of America by Michael Harriot. Funny, sharp, and thoroughly researched, which is a rare combination. He tells the American story the way the receipts tell it. You’ll laugh, and two paragraphs later you’ll stop laughing, and that whiplash is what learning the truth actually feels like.

Then handle the money, because the money is where they get us. The Black Tax: The Cost of Being Black in America by Shawn D. Rochester lays out in plain numbers what discrimination has cost us over generations and what it’s meant for our ability to build anything and keep it. It isn’t a hype book. It’s arithmetic. Sit with the arithmetic.

Four titles. Two on what pressure does to a man, one on the record nobody taught you, one on the money. Add whatever you actually enjoy and you’ve got yourself a year of real education for often less than a weekend out costs.

I’m not telling you to delete your apps. I still laugh at the same foolishness you laugh at. But there’s a difference between eating and being fed, and a grown man ought to know which one he’s doing.

The goal was never to become the brother quoting books at the cookout. It’s to be harder to fool. Harder to sell. Harder to steer. To sit across from a man who wants something from you and hear the hollow spot in what he’s saying.

Put ten pages between you and the algorithm today. Do it again tomorrow.

Staff Writer; Mark Brooks

This brother writes about faith, money, brotherhood, and the real work of being a man from one day to the next… He keeps it plain, with his attention on home, community, and helping brothers do a little better…

Contact him at MarkB@ThyBlackMan.com.

The fireworks have dimmed, and the Fourth-of-You-Lie sales are waning. In this country, we commemorate through commerce and celebrate through retail activity, so even though we are just a few days into July, back-to-school signs are already shouting from store windows and websites.

Who is going back to school, and under what circumstances?

As with every milestone in this country, inequality roars. Some students will return to school with new laptops, quiet rooms, family-paid tuition, and networks that cushion every stumble. Others will return carrying debt, doubt, family obligations, food insecurity, transportation challenges, and the accumulated disadvantages of underfunded schools and under-resourced communities.

The back-to-school season is marketed as a fresh start. For too many students, it is also a reminder that opportunity in America has always been rationed.

That is why Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) still matter. Indeed, that is why HBCUs remain the vanguard.

The vanguard is not always the largest part of the army. It is the front edge. It moves first. It absorbs blows. It clears the path. By that definition, HBCUs have always been the vanguard. They were built because this country’s higher education system excluded Black people by law, custom, violence, and contempt. Their founding question was not, “How do we reproduce privilege?” Their founding question was, “How do we cultivate genius where America has refused to see it?”

That question remains urgent.

HBCUs enroll only a fraction of Black college students, but their impact is outsized. In 2022, HBCUs enrolled about 9 percent of Black college students, yet they produced 16 percent of the bachelor’s degrees earned by Black students in 2021–22. UNCF reports that HBCUs generate $16.5 billion in annual economic impact, support more than 136,000 jobs, and that the 2021 HBCU graduating class is projected to earn $146 billion over their lifetimes.

These are not sentimental institutions. They are economic engines, leadership factories, and community anchors.

Still, HBCUs are too often asked to do transformative work with transactional support.

That contradiction is especially sharp now, as federal student loan policy shifts under the feet of students and families. The Biden-era SAVE plan — Saving on a Valuable Education — was designed to make repayment less punishing by tying payments to income and family size, reducing monthly payments for many borrowers, limiting runaway interest, and creating a shorter forgiveness path for some small-balance borrowers. Now SAVE has ended, and millions of borrowers have been told to move into other repayment plans.

The change lands first on borrowers already in repayment, but current students are not untouched. Undergraduates will face a narrower repayment landscape when they leave school. Families will confront new Parent PLUS limits. Graduate and professional students will face new borrowing caps just as advanced credentials remain expensive and often necessary. Graduate PLUS loans, which previously allowed many graduate students to borrow up to the cost of attendance, are being phased out for new borrowers. Grad PLUS was the backstop many students used when tuition and living costs exceeded unsubsidized loan limits.

These numbers are not abstractions. They determine who can become a nurse practitioner, a physical therapist, a psychologist, a professor, a public health leader, a lawyer, a dentist, a physician, or a minister. They determine who can move from the first degree to the next rung. They determine whether talent is nurtured or stranded.

For Black students, the stakes are higher because the debt burden is heavier. Black students are more likely to borrow for college, more likely to borrow more, and more likely to struggle in repayment because the racial wealth gap follows them from home to campus and from campus to workplace. A loan policy that may look race-neutral on paper can still deepen racial inequality in practice.

That is the context in which HBCUs do their work. They educate students through inequality, against inequality, and beyond inequality. They do not merely polish privilege. They cultivate possibility. They take seriously the students America too often treats as afterthoughts, and they turn potential into leadership.

Having led an HBCU, I know both the miracle, the math, and the myth. At Bennett College, I saw daily what HBCUs do with too little: stretch dollars, nurture brilliance, hold students close, and insist that Black women’s futures were worth fighting for. I know the devotion of faculty, the exhaustion of administrators, the anxiety of families, and the constant scramble for resources. I also know this: HBCUs cannot be praised in February and underfunded in July. They cannot be applauded at commencements and ignored in appropriations. They cannot be celebrated as cultural treasures while their students are left to navigate a debt system that punishes aspiration.

The country loves the symbolism of back-to-school season. New backpacks. New notebooks. New slogans. But the real question is not what is on sale, it’s what is at stake.

If HBCUs are the vanguard, then the question is not whether they have earned our admiration. They have. The question is whether they will receive the investment, protection, and respect that their record demands.

Back to school should not mean back to debt, back to rationed opportunity, or back to the same old inequalities dressed up in fresh retail packaging. It should mean back to possibility. Back to purpose. Back to institutions that have carried us when the broader society would not.

HBCUs are still carrying us. The question is whether public policy will finally carry its share.

The numbers and facts around the decline in youth participating in sports are eye-opening. 62 percent of children, ages 6 to 12 do not play sports regularly and the average age at which children quit sports is just 12 years old. Some of the biggest names through the world of sports are part of this campaign including NBA player Stephen Curry, WNBA player A’Ja Wilson, and NFL player Lamar Jackson among the ambassadors to encourage and promote youth sports participation.

It is the low 38 percent youth sports participation rate that is one of the reasons for this initiative. Sports ambassadors and ESPN anchors and personalities participated in a different ads and promos, which ran across ESPN platforms, that addressed critical youth sports issues. One of the biggest issues for getting kids to play sports is affordability. Over 900,000 youth received support to participate in athletics through grants and the YMCA was among the avenues for those youth to participate. This is the second year of the Take Back Sports initiative and there were good results.

There has also been some volatility in youth sports leagues with the behavior of adults. It is not uncommon to see local news clips that highlight the parents of some young athletes who are harassing each other or verbally abusing referees or officials for youth sports leagues.  Youth coaches also feel the anger from parents sometimes as well. A recent national survey named “the challenge of managing parents ranks among the top reasons coaches have considered leaving or decided to quit”. Unruly parents in youth sports deters from the enjoyment for all kids who are participating in that particular sport.

The impact of youth sports is multilayered from a health, wellness, stress relief, and teamwork aspect. There are many lessons to be learned from kids and teenagers who play and enjoy sports. According to ESPN Vice President of Corporate Citizenship Kevin Martinez, “Sports have the power to shape confidence, character and community at an early age, but with only 38% of kids playing sports on a regular basis, ESPN recognizes the critical need to build systems that make those opportunities accessible to more young athletes.” It’s not about finding the next great young athlete but the importance of youth sports be part of the childhood experience to become more of a team player and working together as an adult towards everyone’s success.

Staff Writer; Mark Hines

The Connection Between School Quality and Neighborhood Vitality

Research consistently shows that the quality of local schools is one of the top factors families consider when choosing where to live. When a neighborhood earns a reputation for excellent public education, it tends to attract and retain residents who are deeply invested in the long-term health of that community. Property values stabilize, local businesses benefit from consistent foot traffic, and civic organizations gain the engaged membership they need to function effectively. This dynamic creates a virtuous cycle in which strong schools produce informed, motivated graduates who go on to become the teachers, entrepreneurs, and community leaders of tomorrow.

In Los Angeles specifically, this pattern plays out across dozens of neighborhoods. Families who once felt they had no choice but to relocate in search of better educational options are increasingly finding that high-quality public schools exist closer to home than they realized. Identifying those schools, and understanding what makes them successful, is the first step toward making informed decisions for children and communities alike.

What Sets the Top Public Schools Apart

Not all schools that perform well share the same formula, but the most consistently successful institutions tend to share a few core characteristics. Strong instructional leadership, a stable and experienced teaching staff, high expectations for all students regardless of background, and genuine family engagement are recurring features of schools that outperform their peers. Equally important is a school culture that treats students as capable individuals rather than passive recipients of information.

For parents navigating the complex landscape of public education in Southern California, resources that aggregate and contextualize school performance data are invaluable. A thorough look at the best schools in los angeles reveals that high performance is not limited to any single zip code or demographic. Charter schools, magnet programs, and traditional neighborhood schools all appear among the top performers, which speaks to the diversity of educational models that can succeed when the right conditions are in place.

The Role of Community Investment in School Success

Schools do not exist in isolation. Their success is deeply intertwined with the communities they serve and the broader networks of support that surround them. Parent-teacher organizations, local business partnerships, nonprofit foundations, and city government all play meaningful roles in determining whether a school can sustain its performance over time. When these stakeholders align around a shared commitment to student outcomes, the results can be transformative.

Community investment also takes more tangible forms. Volunteer tutoring programs, after-school enrichment activities, mentorship initiatives connecting students with working professionals, and fundraising campaigns for technology and arts programs all contribute to an educational environment that goes beyond what standardized test scores can capture. Schools that thrive in Los Angeles are almost always embedded in networks of community support that extend well beyond the classroom walls.

Education as an Engine of Economic Mobility

The economic argument for investing in public education is compelling and well-documented. Students who receive a strong foundational education are significantly more likely to complete high school, pursue post-secondary credentials, and enter the workforce with the skills employers actually need. Over a lifetime, the income differential between those who complete a quality education and those who do not is substantial, and those individual outcomes aggregate into measurable effects on local and regional economies.

As Pew Research Center has documented through decades of social and economic analysis, educational attainment remains one of the strongest predictors of economic security and upward mobility in the United States. In a city as economically diverse as Los Angeles, where the gap between high earners and low earners is among the widest in the nation, the stakes of educational access are especially high. Every student who gains access to a quality school represents not just an individual success story, but a concrete contribution to the city’s long-term economic resilience.

Looking Forward: Building on What Works

The encouraging news is that Los Angeles has no shortage of models worth scaling. Schools that have managed to close achievement gaps, raise graduation rates, and send first-generation college students to four-year universities are demonstrating every day that the obstacles are not insurmountable. The challenge now is ensuring that the lessons learned in those high-performing environments can be applied more broadly, and that families across the city have the information they need to advocate for their children effectively.

Policy conversations about school funding equity, teacher recruitment and retention, and the expansion of successful school models are all part of this larger picture. So too are the quieter, less headline-grabbing efforts of individual principals, counselors, and classroom teachers who show up every day committed to making a difference. Progress in public education rarely arrives in dramatic leaps. It accumulates through sustained effort, honest evaluation, and a willingness to learn from both successes and failures.

Los Angeles is a city with enormous potential, and its schools are both a reflection of that potential and one of the primary means of realizing it. When communities rally around the goal of educational excellence, the benefits extend far beyond any individual student or classroom. They ripple outward into neighborhoods, economies, and generations, shaping the kind of city Los Angeles is capable of becoming. The work is ongoing, but the evidence that it matters could not be clearer.

Staff Writer; Walter Jones

1. Dolan Accepted Without Asking the Players

Dolan accepted the invitation before even asking the players if they would attend. In an interview with New York Magazine, Jalen Brunson explained that he and the other players hadn’t even discussed the possibility of visiting the White House before Dolan announced that the team would be going. “We haven’t discussed it,” Brunson said. “But as a team, we’ll discuss it, and we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.” That was not agreement from the players. This is a player being as diplomatic as possible in expressing his team’s position on visiting the White House.

2. This Is a Personal Favor, Not a Presidential Honor

Dolan and Trump have been friends for thirty years. In fact, in Game 3 of the NBA Finals, Dolan personally extended an invitation for Trump to attend the game and then even sat with him in the owner’s box. As political strategist Antjuan Seawright told ESPN, “I think the only reason the Knicks received the invite is because of the relationship with the owner and Donald Trump.’’ This is just a friend doing a favor for a friend and the players will be nothing more than props in Dolan’s attempt to repay a favor to Trump.

3. Trump Was Booed Inside Madison Square Garden

New York spoke on June 8th and it was clear. When the jumbotron at MSG showed an image of Trump at Game 3 of the NBA Finals, the crowd at the home of the Knicks erupted in loud, sustained, and intense booing. The fans who supported this club through 53 years of disappointment made their opinions on Trump’s attendance very clear. Why would the team honor that attendance with a party?

4. The “Trump Curse” Is Real in Knicks Lore Now

Game 3 was the only game in which the Knicks lost in the entire NBA Finals series. It was also the only game in which Donald Trump appeared to root for them. Following the loss, Knicks fans went to MSG to burn sage and try to clear the space of any negative energy left behind by Trump’s visit. That may sound superstitious, but the sentiment is totally real: Trump’s presence at the game felt like a bad omen, not an honor. Visiting him now would be a strange way for the team to celebrate.

5. Josh Hart Has Already Made His Position Clear

On the other hand, another player for the Knicks, Josh Hart, let his voice be heard during the 2020 presidential election. When referring to Donald Trump, Hart stated that Trump is a “dumbass” and wrote this on his social media account not once but twice. For this reason, if the Knicks were to be invited to the White House, Hart would have to be left out of the occasion. This in turn could lead to a huge media circus, with Hart as the center of attention, which would be very awkward for the team.

6. Every NBA Champion During Trump’s First Term Said No

Not a single NBA championship team during Trump’s first term in office traveled to the White House for a celebratory visit. The Golden State Warriors publicly declined two separate invites for the White House visit. With the highly politicized atmosphere of Trump’s White House and the already very divided politics, the players played it safe. The politics would be too much for most of the players, and as we have all come to realize, they are not naive to the political implications that come with a White House visit for a sports team. The Knicks would not just be ending the streak for NBA championship teams, but would add an even greater layer of complexity as fans and media compare the situations to the two previous declines by the Golden State Warriors.

7. New York City’s Mayor Wasn’t Subtle About It Either

Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist who led the Keys to the City ceremony, represents the political opposite of Donald Trump. The city that hosted this championship parade, packing the Canyon of Heroes for the parade of Jalen Brunson and the rest of the team, voted overwhelmingly against Trump in the last elections. So for the team to celebrate with Mamdani and the rest of New Yorkers in the days following their championship, and then turn around and celebrate with Trump at the White House, would send a contradictory message to the city that made this possible.

8. The Celebration Already Happened — And It Was Perfect

Millions turned out for the ticker-tape parade through the Canyon of Heroes after the Knicks won their first NBA championship in 53 years. Jalen Brunson held the Larry O’Brien Trophy on a float while the city lost its collective mind. They got to hold the championship trophy, and then they got to hold the keys to the city. That celebration was enough. There is nothing that a visit to the White House could add to that, and nothing that the fans would want added to it.

9. The Timing Looks Like a Political Statement

Visiting the White House is a tradition for teams right after winning a championship. But that does not mean it is mandatory. When a team decides not to visit the White House after winning a championship, it is news for a day, and then it is forgotten for good. But when a team does visit the White House after winning a championship and the visit turns into a political flashpoint, the team and its players are then harassed for years by the visit and the way that it is perceived. Given the current national politics, when the Knicks visit the White House, it will not be perceived as a neutral sports tradition but rather as an endorsement. That is not how the Knicks’ legacy should be defined. The Knicks’ legacy should be defined by the players and by the fans, not by the friendship of one owner and the President of the United States.

10. The Players Earned This Championship. The Choice Should Be Theirs.

Jalen Brunson played through injury and pressure to put the team in position to win its first title in over half a century. His teammates grinded through a 13 game winning streak. The players earned this championship. They deserve to decide how it is celebrated and by who. The locker room has yet to discuss whether or not the team should celebrate at the White House but James Dolan has already signed them up for the event before the team has even discussed it. That was a mistake and the players should have the final say.

Whose Celebration Is This, Really? 

The Knicks won a championship for all of New York — the fans, the city, and the kids who grew up all across the city waiting for a moment like this. The way they celebrate matters greatly. This is not a celebration of a championship that will be enhanced by a White House visit driven by the owner’s personal relationship with the President. It will be a complicated event and the players should determine for themselves whether or not they wish to cross that bridge.

Associate Editor; Stanley G. Buford

Feel free to connect with this brother via Twitter; Stanley G. and also facebook; http://www.facebook.com/sgbuford.

Also his email addy is; StanleyG@ThyBlackMan.com.

Creating these environments requires long-term thinking and a commitment to investing in both people and places.

Safety Starts with Strong Communities

Some of the safest and most resilient communities are not necessarily those with the most resources. Instead, they are often communities where people know one another, look out for each other, and take pride in their neighborhoods.

For many African-American families, churches, community centers, local organizations, and neighborhood groups have historically played a vital role in creating support networks. These institutions provide mentorship, educational opportunities, and safe spaces where young people can learn, socialize, and develop positive relationships.

When residents feel connected to their communities, they are often more invested in protecting and improving them.

Investing in Young People Creates Long-Term Results

Children who have access to positive role models, safe recreational spaces, and educational opportunities are more likely to grow into confident and engaged adults.

After-school programs, sports clubs, arts initiatives, and mentorship schemes all provide valuable environments where young people can develop skills, build friendships, and explore their interests. These opportunities can also help reduce exposure to negative influences while encouraging personal growth.

Creating safer environments means recognizing that prevention is often more effective than intervention. Supporting young people today can help build stronger communities tomorrow.

The Role of Thoughtful Infrastructure

Physical environments influence how people interact with the spaces around them.

Well-maintained public areas, adequate lighting, secure facilities, and clearly defined community spaces all contribute to a stronger sense of safety and belonging. Schools, community centers, apartment complexes, and local businesses increasingly use modern security solutions to help protect visitors and staff while maintaining accessibility.

For example, many organizations now implement access control systems to help manage entry points and improve security without creating unnecessary barriers for those using the facilities. When implemented thoughtfully, these technologies can support safer environments while helping communities remain welcoming and inclusive.

Education Remains a Powerful Tool

Knowledge empowers individuals to make informed decisions and contribute positively to society.

Communities that prioritize education often see benefits that extend far beyond academic achievement. Educational opportunities can improve economic prospects, encourage civic engagement, and create pathways to leadership.

Parents, educators, and community leaders all play important roles in helping young people understand their potential and providing the support they need to pursue it.

Investing in education is one of the most effective ways to create lasting change across generations.

Creating Spaces Where Everyone Feels They Belong

Safety is not just about physical protection. It is also about feeling respected, valued, and included.

Children thrive when they see positive representations of themselves in leadership positions, educational settings, and community organizations. Inclusive environments encourage participation, foster confidence, and help individuals feel connected to the communities around them.

Whether in schools, workplaces, places of worship, or neighborhood organizations, creating a culture of belonging strengthens communities and helps people feel more secure.

The Importance of Community Leadership

Positive change rarely happens by accident.

Throughout history, African-American leaders, activists, educators, business owners, and volunteers have worked tirelessly to improve opportunities within their communities. Their efforts demonstrate the impact that dedicated leadership can have on creating safer and more supportive environments.

Future generations will continue to benefit from individuals who are willing to invest their time, knowledge, and energy into strengthening the communities around them.

Leadership does not always require holding a formal position. Small actions taken consistently by ordinary people often have an extraordinary impact over time.

Looking Ahead

Creating safer environments for future generations is not a single project or initiative. It is an ongoing commitment to building stronger communities, supporting young people, investing in education, and creating spaces where everyone has the opportunity to succeed.

While technology and infrastructure certainly play important roles, the foundation of every safe community remains the people who live there. By working together, supporting one another, and focusing on long-term progress, communities can create environments where future generations are not only protected but empowered to thrive.

Staff Writer; Carl Carter

Which is why watching the rest of this country finally wake up feels a little surreal. The sport isn’t coming here anymore. It already arrived, and the World Cup just made it impossible to ignore. The whole thing is unfolding right here as I write this, spread across the United States, Mexico, and Canada, the first World Cup shared by three host nations. Sixteen cities are carrying the tournament, including eleven in the United States, with stadiums filling up with people who painted their faces and learned chants in languages they don’t speak. And credit where it’s owed, the host nation has shown out. Fan zones packed shoulder to shoulder, strangers from forty different countries swapping jerseys outside the gates, volunteers walking lost visitors to the right train without breaking a sweat. We don’t always nail the big stuff, but we know how to throw a party, and the planet is finding that out in real time.

My neighbor, a man who spent twenty years swearing the beautiful game was boring, texted me at midnight after Türkiye dropped three on the United States. “Bro I’m hooked.” Three to two, last second drama, and suddenly he gets it. That is the part nobody warns you about. You don’t choose this thing. It chooses you, usually when you weren’t even looking.

Folks overseas have known forever. Walk through any neighborhood in São Paulo, Lagos, Naples, or Manchester and you’ll find children using two backpacks as a goal, dreaming the exact same dream. For them this was never a question. The planet stops for a month every four years, schools empty out, grown men weep in the street. America was the last big holdout, the cousin at the cookout who swore he didn’t like the music until the right song finally dropped.

And here’s the bit that still cracks me up. The entire world calls it football. Makes perfect sense, seeing as you play it with your feet. Then we came along, looked at a sport where a fella cradles a ball shaped like an egg in his arms and sprints, and decided that was football. The audacity. We took the one word that already had a job and handed it to a contest built on throwing and tackling. Beautiful country, terrible naming committee.

Respect has to be paid where it’s owed, though, and the names alone tell you why the rest of the globe never doubted. Pelé turned this into art before color television could keep up. Maradona carried an entire nation on one fierce, brilliant left foot. The Brazilian Ronaldo, the original, moved like a man who knew gravity was optional. Zidane had violence and grace living in the same body. Ronaldinho grinned so wide you forgot he was embarrassing grown professionals on national TV.

The current crop is no joke either. Messi spends his weekends in Miami now, suiting up in MLS of all places, which still feels like a typo whenever I say it out loud. The little maestro chose to live among us, and casual viewers are only beginning to grasp what they ignored for so long. Cristiano Ronaldo built himself into a machine through nothing but stubborn will, still banging them in deep into his forties like the calendar owes him money. Kylian Mbappé, a forward for La Liga club Real Madrid and the France national team, runs like a sports car with a conscience. Vinícius makes defenders look stuck in wet concrete. Haaland, a striker for Premier League club Manchester City and the Norway national team, scores the way the rest of us breathe. Lamine Yamal, a right winger for Barcelona and Spain, is barely old enough to vote and already bending matches to his will. Jude Bellingham, a midfielder for Real Madrid and England, struts around like he owns whatever pitch he stands on, and most nights he does.

We’ve grown our own too, which the doubters love to forget. Clint Dempsey competed with a chip on his shoulder the size of Texas. Landon Donovan gave us that goal against Algeria, the one that had office workers losing their minds on a Wednesday afternoon. Tim Howard once made sixteen saves in a single match and briefly turned into a folk hero. Now Christian Pulisic carries the badge, a kid from Pennsylvania holding his own among Europe’s finest, proof this place can produce more than skeptics.

What changed? The young changed it. A whole generation came up with the Premier League on Saturday mornings, La Liga and Serie A a click away by lunch, the Bundesliga and Ligue 1 humming in the background, with video games that taught them who plays where, with phone clips of impossible finishes looping past midnight. Major League Soccer grew up right in their backyard while the old heads weren’t paying attention. They never needed convincing. They walked in already fluent. Grandparents griped, parents shrugged, and the youngest among us quietly built a culture while everybody else argued about whether a draw was somehow un-American.

I think about my old high school squad sometimes. We were a mix of everybody, kids whose families came from Mexico, Ghana, El Salvador, and a few like me whose roots ran straight through the American South. On that field none of it mattered. You either passed the ball or you didn’t. This sport has always done that, flattened the differences, handed a common language to people who couldn’t otherwise order lunch together. That’s the secret the rest of the globe figured out generations back, and it’s the lesson landing in living rooms here right now whether folks asked for it or not.

The skeptics will hold out a while longer. Some of them always will, and that’s fine. But the tide already turned. You can feel it in the bars going dead silent before a penalty, in the office betting pools, in the way my once-stubborn neighbor now sends me tactical theories at two in the morning like he personally invented the back three. Conversion looks like that. Loud, sudden, slightly embarrassing.

So welcome, late as usual, but you made it. Pour into the seats, butcher the chants, fall hard for some defender on the other side of the planet you’ll be defending in arguments by August. The rest of us, the ones who loved this through every lean year, we’ll save you a spot. Just do me one small favor while you’re here.

Try, at least once, calling it football. The whole world is waiting on you.

Staff Writer; J.G. Lacour

Covering the NBA, NFL, college basketball, college football, and Major League Baseball from a Black man’s perspective. He loves the full world of sports, but the NFL remains his favorite.

Need to contact this bro, feel free to use this email address; JGLacour@ThyBlackMan.com.

First, we have the foreigners visiting the U.S. to cheer on their teams in this year’s World Cup soccer championship. As I wrote last week, it’s been heartwarming to see how much these people love America, and how surprised they’ve been to find that Americans are warm, welcoming, generous and kind people.

Another aspect of America that has astonished our guests is the number, size and variety of our businesses: restaurants of every type, small boutiques, “big box” supermarkets and corner grocers, food trucks, outdoor equipment and hunting stores (with their ubiquitous guns and ammo), mom-and-pop shops, little kids’ lemonade stands, delicatessens — you name it. Social media is filled with posts and videos in which visitors express their amazement at the quality of the food (and portion size!), “free” appetizers and soda refills, and the uncountable options and choices among America’s products and services.

That, my friends, is a consequence of America’s culture of entrepreneurship — a fact that some of the foreigners here have recognized and remarked upon with envy. One Canadian described us as “the most opportunity-dense country ever.”

He’s right.

So I was disappointed (though not surprised) when Pope Leo XIV posted on X a few days ago that food, water and health care shouldn’t be “commodities” that are subject to “market considerations.” In his follow-up post, he “appealed to governments” to “increase the resources dedicated to combating hunger and its root causes.”

Seriously? Governments are the chief “root causes” of hunger.

The key to adequate food production is not government but small business. Sorry, Holy Father, but food, water and health care are “commodities,” because their provision, for the most part, depends upon the work of other human beings. I would love to hear the pope praise and promote the market, individual initiative and entrepreneurial capitalism as the tickets to human flourishing that they are, instead of treating them as tawdry institutions to be tolerated at best, while government is hailed as the answer to every human problem.

Entrepreneurship meets human needs far better than governments ever have or ever will. This is true even in the world’s poorest nations. There, like everywhere else, people can start little businesses. But officials, regulations, laws, paperwork, permits, fees and taxes — all of which benefit the rich and promote corruption and fraud — stymie the growth of those businesses. When poor people are permitted to grow their businesses, they don’t stay poor.

That only happens when government gets out of the way.

As an American, Pope Leo should know better. But he apparently has a lot of company, even here in the States. In this week’s Democrat primaries in New York City, not one but three socialist candidates won their races.

Aber Kawas, a Muslim Palestinian activist and member of Democratic Socialists of America who has stated that the U.S. deserved 9/11 because of “white supremacy” and “Islamophobia,” won her primary for a New York state Senate race. Self-professed communist Darializa Chevalier defeated incumbent Adriano Espaillat to win the primary for the congressional seat in New York’s 13th district. Chevalier is a convert to Islam and a founder of Columbia University (why am I not surprised?) Apartheid Divest, which calls for an “international intifada” and the “eradication of western civilization,” the abolition of the police and immediate citizenship for all illegal aliens. And socialist Brad Lander defeated incumbent Dan Goldman for New York’s 10th district congressional seat. Lander, too, wants to abolish immigration enforcement, as well as pack the U.S. Supreme Court and pass $2 trillion in student loan debt onto the American taxpayers.

The DSA claims it’s only targeting “millionaires and billionaires” (and the world’s only trillionaire — at least on paper). If you believe that, your head is firmly wedged in your nethermost orifice. Time to read some real history — not the propaganda Western Leftists can get away with only because private enterprise insulates them and the societies they infect from the worst consequences of their ideologies.

Here’s the truth: Socialists and communists neither know how to make anything nor how to build an organization that provides goods or services people are willing to pay for. (Nope, a campaign isn’t the same thing.)

What they do instead is traffic in grievances for their personal aggrandizement.

They exploit ignorance and foster resentment, telling their followers that the only reason they have less is because others have more, and that it’s been stolen or gotten through greed and exploitation. In that vein, they love to focus on major multinational corporations and their extremely wealthy owners and CEOs, even though the backbone of American business is family-owned and small — the vast majority (80%-plus) of companies with employees have fewer than 20.

They preach that wealth is a zero sum game and a limited pie, and refuse to acknowledge that enterprise creates wealth that didn’t exist before, even though the evidence is everywhere. (Did we have the automotive industry 150 years ago? The personal computer industry 100 years ago? The smartphone industry 50 years ago?)

Socialists promise what they can never deliver: an unlimited supply of high-quality goods and services that are cheap or free. And they drive up costs for producers with restrictive regulations and taxes while demanding that prices cannot rise to keep up with those increasing costs.

The result is that businesses are forced to leave or close. Not the big corporations — at least, not at first — but the small ones that house, feed, employ and create the middle class. Then they raise taxes and costs even higher to make up the difference.

Sometimes they take over the businesses. Or even entire industries. That’s the beginning of a precipitous decline.

They don’t understand production, inventory management or balance sheets. With no competition, there’s no need for quality or customer service. So the production declines, the quality declines, the management declines and the rationing starts.

Complainers are smeared as greedy individualists or capitalist throwbacks who don’t want everyone to be “equal” and don’t understand that sacrifices have to be made for “progress.”

No one should be fooled by the presence of the erudite “intellectuals” leading these movements at the beginning. Those self-loathing, upper-class graduates of the best schools don’t last long, because unhappy masses can’t be kept in line (bread or otherwise) by pious platitudes.

No, that takes force. And that’s when the thugs take over.

This is what’s meant when pundits say, “You can vote yourself into socialism or communism, but you have to shoot your way out.”

The America that our World Cup visitors are marveling at was built by freedom-loving entrepreneurs operating within the reasonable structures of a limited government — people of every background who were willing to sacrifice much to build their American dream. We are all the beneficiaries of their hard work.

But what took 250 years to build can be destroyed by socialists within a very short time.

Written by Laura Hollis

Official website; http://law.nd.edu/directory/laura-hollis/

In the House, it narrowly passed 218-214.

Not one Democrat voted for it in either chamber.

President Donald Trump signed it into law on July 4, 2025.

One provision in this narrowly passed law had the potential to help school children all across the country. It was the Federal Scholarship Tax Credit program. This program, now set to begin in 2027, will give Americans a nonrefundable tax credit of up to $1,700 per year for making donations to support school-choice scholarships set up in the states.

“Under the program,” explains the Congressional Research Service, “taxpayers will be eligible to receive a tax credit of up to $1,700 for the value of cash contributions to certain scholarship granting organizations (SGOs). These organizations, in turn, will be required to use these contributions to grant scholarships to students at private and public elementary and secondary schools located within their states.”

Recipients of these scholarships would be subject to a family income limit. “Eligibility for scholarships,” said the CRS, “will be limited to students whose family income is below 300% of their area median income.”

Recipients will be able to use the money from these scholarships to cover basic educational costs, including tuition and books, at elementary and secondary schools, whether they are “public, private or religious.”

Whether or not to participate in this school-choice scholarship program was left to the states themselves. “States (and the District of Columbia) may choose whether to recognize eligible SGOs within their jurisdictions,” explained the CRS report. “To qualify for the credit, a contribution must be made to a state-sponsored SGO (which need not be located in the same state as the taxpayer), and the organization must only provide scholarships to students located within the state that recognized it. This effectively allows states to decide whether to make students who live within their borders eligible for the program.”

Why would the political leadership of a state prevent students in their state from receiving scholarship money voluntarily contributed by individual Americans? Because they want to prevent families, who would otherwise lack the necessary resources, from choosing to send their children to private or religious schools rather than to government-run schools.

By contrast, Republican Gov. Jim Pillen of Nebraska wasted little time in signing his state up for these scholarships. On Sept. 29, 2025, he went to St. Teresa Catholic School, not far from the Nebraska capital, and signed an executive order backing his state’s participation in the program. “This program is a game-changer for Nebraska students and their families, generating funds that will help send students to the school of their choice,” he said.

South Dakota soon followed Nebraska. Republican Gov. Larry Rhoden announced on Nov. 14, 2025, that his state also would be joining the school-choice scholarship program. “Parents should have the freedom to choose the learning environment that sets their kids up for success,” he said. “I am grateful that President Trump has the same conviction and is helping us create more opportunities for our students.”

Yet it was not just Republican governors who had their states join the program. The Colorado Sun reported on Dec. 5, 2025, that Democratic Colorado Gov. Jared Polis “said it was a no-brainer for the state to take advantage of the federal tax credit scholarship program, describing it as ‘a real boom of investment in kids.'”

“I mean, it would be crazy not to,” he said.

When the Kentucky state legislature passed a bill in March that opted their state into the Federal Scholarship Tax Credit program, Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear took a different approach. He vetoed the bill. “Kentuckians have been firm that public dollars should only be used for public education,” Beshear said.

“Kentuckians love our public schools,” he said.

The Kentucky legislature overwhelmingly disagreed — with the state senate voting 31-5 and the state house voting 77-14 to override Beshear’s veto.

What did California, the nation’s most populous state, do about the Federal Scholarship Tax Credit program? Republican Rep. Vince Fong of California sent Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom a letter in January urging him to bring their state into the program. “By electing to participate, you would ensure this new federal education benefit will flow to California students, regardless of whether they attend a public or private school, and at no cost to the State,” Fong wrote to Newsom.

The IRS published a list indicating that, as of June 22, there were 28 states that had signed up to participate in the Federal Scholarship Tax Credit Program. Newsom’s California was not one of them.

Newsom, as this column has noted before, attended Notre Dame des Victoires, a Catholic grammar school in the heart of San Francisco.

When that school marked its 100th anniversary in 2024, Newsom recalled the remarkable opportunity it had provided him.

“Attending Ecole Notre Dame des Victoires was a transformative experience,” he said. “It was here that I learned not only how to conjugate verbs in French, but also about the rich tapestry of French Catholic history. This foundation has stayed with me throughout my life, and I am grateful for the lifelong connections and values instilled in me during my time at NDV.”

So, why is he not supporting a program that would provide funding to help children in San Francisco today embrace a similar experience?

The 2025 National Assessment of Educational Progress “long-term trend” tests showed a continuing pattern in American education: Catholic school students outscored public school students in reading and math. Among 13-year-olds, the average reading score among public school students was 255 out of 500. Among Catholic school students, it was 276 out of 500. The average mathematics score among 13-year-olds in public schools was 269 out of 500. Among Catholic school students, it was 291 out of 500.

Embracing unlimited school choice, where every student gets a voucher equal to the full per-pupil expenditures in the local public schools, would be good for students and for our country.

Written by Terence P. Jeffrey

Official website; http://twitter.com/terryjeffrey

The Chinese leader’s assessment of the United States may have been self-serving, but it is a true. The United States as a world superpower is on the decline. Our respect on the world stage is diminished, and we are humiliated over the events and negotiations surrounding the Iran war. Any person can be quick to defend the United States against criticism or against things said that would place the nation in a negative light.

Some will go as far as to reframe the truth to avoid having America’s weaknesses and moral failures exposed. In other words, they will outright lie without reservation.  In a follow-up post to Truth Social, Trump said, “When President Xi very elegantly referred to the United States as perhaps being a declining nation, he was referring to the tremendous damage we suffered during the four years of Sleepy Joe Biden and the Biden Administration, and on that score, he was 100% correct.”

There was no indication that Xi was referring to Biden in his comments.  When the President of the United States habitually lies to the American people without hesitation, it not only shows the disrespect he personally has for the office he holds, but it becomes evidence to show how we are a nation in moral decline. Unfortunately, the president is not the only high-ranking official within the administration who produces reckless lies.

Vice President JD Vance falsely denied that Black history is being erased from public spaces under the Trump-Vance administration during a televised interview on the “The View”. While being pressed by hosts Whoopi Goldberg and Sunny Hostin, Vance was challenged on the administration’s polices to censor or remove Black history exhibits across the country, and the loss of tens of thousands of jobs for Black Americans as a result of President Trump’s executive orders targeting diversity, equity and inclusion programs. He was challenged on cuts to the federal workforce, where Blacks have been overrepresented for decades. When pressed further, Vance denied that the White House made efforts to eliminate Black history, telling “The View” hosts, “Black history is not erased from public spaces.”

Black prosperity is part of what makes America great. It is Black resilience that makes America great. The fact the enslaved Blacks built the U.S. Capitol, and their descendants would later occupy it as elected lawmakers is part of the Black experience that makes America great. These are the true stories about the Black experience that JD Vance and others are attempting to whitewash.

One of the reasons United States has become a nation in decline domestically comes from the decision to erase Black history and hold back Black progress. It may not be the political decline referred to by the leader of China, but it becomes a moral decline resulting from implementing white supremacy goals and objectives. “JD Vance can play confused on television all he wants, but we’ve seen this administration spend 18 months erasing Black history from our military, museums, and monuments,” said Brandon Weathersby, a spokesperson for American Bridge 21^st Century, a Democratic research think tank.

We just celebrated the Juneteenth holiday. But does the true meaning hit home with us or is it just another day? The history behind Juneteenth is complex, and is another truth about the Black experience many people would like to see forgotten. Many of us are familiar with the story of how the Emancipation Proclamation took effect, yet in Texas slavery continued in practice for more than two additional years.

It wasn’t until federal troops arrived in Galveston on June 19, 1865 that an estimated 250,000 enslaved Black people learned of a freedom that had already been declared over two years earlier. The delay was structured by power and greed, not by accident: those who benefit from slavery used the delay as a tool to keep extracting labor and wealth from Black bodies. Juneteenth exposes an entrenched unwillingness to grant Black people full justice and freedom, even after laws legally changed.

There are immediate and long-term consequences resulting from the overall anti-Black agenda that we are witnessing today. Every Black high school student and young adult should take a hard look at the fact that Black history is being erased, but also consider how the type of denial by the vice president plays a major part in the moral decline of our nation. They need to fully understand the policy shift by seeing how the Trump administration moved aggressively to dismantle diversity, equity and inclusion efforts across federal agencies, contractors, and schools receiving federal dollars. They need to reflect how these policy shifts will impact their future career goals, dreams and aspirations as a person of color. Teenagers and young adults need to stay informed. The same agenda to withhold justice and freedom to enslaved Blacks still exists today, but under a different covering.

Written by David W. Marshall

Official website; https://davidwmarshallauthor.com/

One may purchase his book, which is titled; God Bless Our Divided America: Unity, Politics and History from a Biblical Perspective.