In her mid-60s, Shelly-Ann had beaten the odds and found love. But, she could likely die because of it. He was charming, good looking and around 15 years her junior. They dated for about five months. Still, her family was suspicious, but they couldn’t have guessed the disturbing truth. Everything was a lie. He wasn’t from North Carolina, he was from New York. He didn’t own a moving company, he was on the run. And by the time her daughter met with representatives of the Date-Check by Headhunter

There were seven of them. Some were members of the Prince Hall Masons, a secret society, and others were the sons of members. It was a cold and stormy night on December 4, 1906 when they gathered in upstate New York. These black Cornell University students decided to create an organization that had no precedent. And, they did so with opposition from their white counterparts on campus and in the community.  They also had opposition from their own, said one of the founders, Nathaniel Murray, who

For R. it was simply a matter of curiosity. He knew little about the Greek-letter organizations, but when different fraternities approached him and his friends about joining, he decided to give it a try. It was at Howard University, the first historically black university to form a black Greek-letter organization. “Each one had different hazing regulation. Each one put you through different events,” said R., who did not want his name used because he has clients who are members of fraternities.

Sixteen-year-old Justin Bryant was scared. His life of staying out late, stealing, getting into fights and hanging with the wrong crowd had landed him in jail. Behind bars he thought of his two coaches. The ones who always pulled him aside and warned him about the path he was on. They stayed on him about his attitude, his cursing, and his unwillingness to follow the rules. He hadn’t listened, choosing instead to follow the boys who hung out on the street. One night, Bryant, two of those boys

Richard Williams woke to piercing pain and the glare of the angry cop who had just clipped him in the forehead with his gun. For the first time in his life, the Oakwood College student felt suffocating fear. He was part of a musical group on tour and they had been stopped on the side of the road in Alabama. It was 1956. It was during the midst of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and months after the brutal murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till. Till was on Williams’ mind as the two white cops harassed

Deborah Evans was 43-years-old and a grandmother when she learned what a slim percentage of America’s black population already knew – that for African Americans there was a second Independence Day. It came decades after the first one and began on June 19, 1865 when the abolition of slavery was announced in Texas, the last state in rebellion after the end of the Civil War. More than 2,000 Union soldiers had to fight to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation to free the remaining slaves in Gal