Michael Cottman

Sybil Wilkes chats with Pulitzer Prize winning author and BlackAmericaWeb.com’s own Michael Cottman about his powerful new book Shackles From the Deep: Tracing the Path of a Sunken Slave Ship, a Bitter Past, and a Rich Legacy.  Check out the full interview below. PART 1: PART 2: Like BlackAmericaWeb.com on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter.

“Don’t be afraid. We are going to bring our country back. But certainly, don’t be afraid.” – President-elect Donald Trump Too late. Americans are already afraid. African-Americans are afraid that Stop and Frisk – and racial profiling — will be revived and that African-Americans and other people of color will be stopped and detained by […]

Republicans are hoping to bring more than patriotic posters and American flags into the Republican National Convention: They want to tote guns, too. In an online petition, more than 50,000 conservatives are leading a campaign to allow guns at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in July. The reason: Conservatives claim they will be “sitting […]

Omar Epps, actor and poet, is shining a bright light on a critical issue that he believes is responsible for increased child poverty and high incarceration rates: fatherless children. I’m glad Epps is addressing this topic in such a profound way. Epps is the Executive Producer of a bold new documentary called Daddy Don’t Go, […]

I was seated inside Arthur Ashe Stadium at the U.S. Open last week watching Serena Williams beat Madison Keys when I heard a man yelling out with all the righteous indignation he could muster. “Serena, go back and eat some more mashed potatoes!” I was momentarily stunned. I paused for a moment to process this hateful – […]

“They took our flag, so be it. They’re taking our heritage from us. They’re taking the freedom out of America.”—William Bader, an imperial wizard of the KKK. Hatred hit the streets of Columbia, South Carolina over the weekend as members of the Ku Klux Klan yelled racial slurs to protest the removal of the Confederate […]

Starbucks is on a mission to recruit a lost generation of America’s young, poor and unemployed to correct a decades-long pattern of neglect in corporate America. While President Barack Obama continues to challenge the nation’s largest corporations to hire more young men of color, Starbucks is leading an ambitious effort to hire 100,000 young African-American […]

It’s now become a hateful pattern: Six black churches burned in two weeks. Black churches in the South are being intentionally torched and federal authorities are correctly investigating the burnings of places of worship as hate crimes. In the weeks following a racist church massacre where nine African-American parishioners were shot dead by a white […]

Why are more African-American children committing suicide? It’s a daunting, and complex question and this much is clear: Suicide rates among African-American children have nearly doubled in the past 20 years, according to a new study, and some Black congressional leaders are asking President Barack Obama to acknowledge the problem. For many, the new report […]

Rudy Giuliani is an unapologetic race monger who seems to despise African American men in elected leadership positions. Last week, Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City, sank to an all-time low when he blamed President Barack Obama for high crime rates in the Black community, a vicious fight in a Brooklyn McDonald’s, and […]

Hillary Clinton should have gone to Selma. Clinton, the polarizing politician who is the likely Democratic frontrunner in the 2016 presidential race, skipped one of the nation’s most significant civil rights events in decades – and her absence was inexcusable. President Barack Obama, the nation’s first African-American president, 100 members of Congress, former President George […]

We know this about Republican lawmakers: Educating African -American students is not high on their list of priorities. Providing quality education for African-American and public school students of color is one of the Obama administration’s top objectives for the next two years. But if congressional Republicans have their way, massive cuts in education spending would […]