Karen Grigsby Bates

On Wednesday, Iraq will hold the first national election since U.S. troops withdrew in 2011. The front-runner is the party of current Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

The death of journalist Ruben Salazar was a catalyst for the nascent Chicano-rights movement. It is still at the center of deeply held belief that he was purposely killed by LA law enforcement.

The euphoria over Lupita Nyong'o's appearance on People's "50 Most Beautiful" list was still swirling on the Interwebs when word came, a mere four days later, that Time's "100 Most Influential" issue was on newsstands. Staring out at us was Beyoncé Knowles Carter, dressed in what appears to be ...

The Mexican-born Kenyan actress has been lauded for her looks, her impeccable fashion sense, and her humility. Now People says she's the most beautiful woman in the world.

The skirmish continues between Sriracha and Irwindale, Calif. Irwindale's city council declared that owner David Tran must curb his hot sauce factory's smelly fumes or they'll do it t...

Playwright Phillip Hayes Dean died earlier this week. His family says the 83 year-old died in Los Angeles of a heart condition. He was in the midst of overseeing a production of his most famous play, "Paul Robeson."

Dean wrote "Paul Robeson" to chronicle the life of the famed scholar, ...

The women of the Congressional Black Caucus have sent a letter asking Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel to reconsider new Army regulations that made headlines earlier this month.

AR 670-1, the revised regulations for grooming and appearance, has some black female enlistees in an uproar: it dictates that black ...

When Chuck Stone worked at the Philadelphia Daily News, staffers for the newspaper got used to calls from reception telling them a person the police were pursuing as violent and criminal was waiting to talk to Stone. The suspects trusted Stone but feared police brutality. The veteran newsman would talk ...

"Nobody from hip hop was supposed to go to Harvard without a degree," says 9th Wonder, a respected producer who's turned out to be a born teacher.

As racial tensions were rising in 1964, Mary Peabody, the mother of the Massachusetts governor, went to St. Augustine, Fla., to protest segregation.

A new biography traces Carmichael's evolution from civil rights activist to an early proponent of the black power movement and international human rights advocate.

The LA suburb of Irwindale has had to balance its need for business success against complaints from residents about the plant's fumes. Huy Fong Foods makes the hot sauce in the rooster bottle.

I Love Lucy was one of the most popular shows in the history of television. Its stars, redheaded Lucille Ball and her Cuban-American husband Desi Arnaz, became TV icons — but they almost didn't get on TV.

Kathleen Brady is the author of Lucille: The Life of Lucille Ball. She ...

When Franklin McCain was a freshman at North Carolina A&T State University, he was sitting himself down at a whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., as a conscious gesture to change the world. Or at least the segregated world in his home state. They were protesting the downtown stores' policy ...

Editor's Note: Roberto Schmidt, the Agence France-Presse staffer who took the photographs discussed in this blog post, has now weighed in on the discussion and provided context. In his own blog post, Schmidt wrote "photos can lie. In reality, just a few seconds earlier the first lady was herself ...

I can't be sure, but it seems to me I first heard the words "Nelson Mandela" when I was in college, way back in the '70s. There was a lot of anti-apartheid activity, lots of demonstrations to encourage several universities to pull their investments out of South Africa. Somewhere in ...

Amy Tan was 200 pages into a new novel when she attended a large exhibition on Shanghai life in the early 1900s. While there, she bought a book she thought might help her as she researched details on life in the Old City. She stopped turning pages when she came ...

The poet Langston Hughes liked to wryly describe the Harlem Renaissance — the years from just after World War I until the Depression when black literature and art flourished, fed by an awakening racial pride — as "the period when the Negro was in vogue." Note the past tense. Two ...

If you've been browsing bookstores this summer, you'll probably notice there are, in some places, whole tables devoted to books about the civil rights movement. The 50th anniversary of the March on Washington has focused national attention on movement history and most everything related to it.

Here at NPR, we've ...

On that sweltering August day in 1963, almost a quarter-million people thronged the National Mall, from the Washington Monument to the columned marble box that is the Lincoln Memorial. The crowning moment, of course, was Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech.

Looking out upon the packed Mall, ...