Karen Grigsby Bates

Anna J. Cooper was a remarkable student and, later, a legendary teacher and principal of the first public high school for black students.

It may be that Claude Fox Sitton so outraged the white Southern segregationists he reported on throughout the civil rights movement because, by all appearances, he could have been standing beside them instead of writing about them in the New York Times.

Known as "the dean of the race beat," ...

A Charlotte news station reported on Monday that the Ritz-Carlton, one of prosperous uptown Charlotte's swankiest hotels, added what looks suspiciously like a black tax to the lobby bar tabs of patrons in town last week for the CIAA, the popular mega-tournament for basketball teams at historically black colleges ...

Fifty years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. visited Los Angeles and spoke to a standing room-only crowd at Temple Israel. The synagogue honors his legacy by replaying the speech once a year.

Oprah Winfrey has named Ruby, a novel about a beautiful, abused woman in Texas, as her March book club selection. That could make first-time novelist Cynthia Bond into a literary star.

New York city's first lady, Chirlane McCray, is being publicly dressed down for not dressing up enough when she attended the funeral of slain NYPD officer Wenjian Liu on Sunday.

McCray, who is married to Mayor Bill de Blasio, came to the ceremony in a nubby, French blue coat ...

As we begin the new year, Code Switch takes a moment to look back at some of the extraordinary, influential and interesting people whom we lost in 2014.

Sam Greenlee

A native Chicagoan, Greenlee drew on his own experiences as one of the first black Foreign Service officers to write ...

The film, about a 1965 voting rights march, stands out for its focus on black characters, including some of the movement's lesser-known organizers, and the way it humanizes Martin Luther King Jr.

Audiobooks as we know them have been around for about 25 years. But the form really took off when MP3 players like the iPod came out.

A filmmaker invited white residents of Buffalo, N.Y., to speak candidly about race. NPR's Karen Grigsby Bates finds that the results are thought-provoking, often surprising and sometimes disturbing.

Thousands of Americans gathered in Washington, D.C. Saturday for the 'Justice for All' rally. The demonstration was to protest the police shooting death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland, as well as decisions not to indict white police officers in the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. and Eric ...

Food writer Andrea Nguyen dives into the story of banh mi, a Vietnamese street sandwich with a French colonial past that's been popping up on menus around the country.

Carol's Daughter was started to sell products for black women who wear their hair natural. But ever since L'Oréal bought the brand, folks are wondering if it can maintain the loyalty of its customers.

Just as women were entering the corporate workplace in big numbers, the shapeless power suit emerged. Over time, the "power look" changed. How do women project power in the modern office?

The 70s and 80s will be remembered by many as the era of disco and Dynasty. But for some of us, those years were marked by the rise of the Jheri Curl. Named for stylist Jheri Redding, the Jheri Curl (and its derivatives) was a two-step permanent process for ethnic ...

From the time of slavery, some light-skinned African-Americans escaped racism by passing as white. The new book, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, explores what they lost.

One new fall TV offering is getting a lot of buzz. Black-ish takes a look a middle-class black suburban family. The show airs in the same month The Cosby Show celebrates its 30th anniversary.

As the situation quiets down in Ferguson, Mo., some political observers are asking why it took President Obama so long to publicly weigh in on events there.

When the Army issued updated grooming rules this spring, many black military women were offended and dismayed. The natural hairstyles many of them favored had been declared illegal: Cornrows were okay, but only if they were no larger in diameter than 1/4 inch (about the size of the diameter of ...

Williams became a household name in 1978 starring in the TV sitcom Mork & Mindy. He went on to appear in films such as Good Morning Vietnam and Good Will Hunting, a role which earned him an Oscar.