Tom Joyner Blog

I hope you’ve had a chance to see the Procter & Gamble video called “The Talk.” It reminds us that African-Americans have to have discussions that some families don’t necessarily need to have – like talks about being judged by their skin color by white people and sadly, by Black people, too. In fact, colorism, […]

It’s African-American Appreciation Month and sometimes even we get stumped by a musical question. Last week on “Arsenio Hall Monday,” we became consumed by Childish Gambino’s hit “RedBone” because it doesn’t include the word redbone in the lyrics. Given the actual lyrics, a more fitting name obviously would have been “Stay Woke.” Arsenio thought that […]

It started with my mom, Buddy, and later my Aunt Nettie…the two most influential women in my early life. Decades later, I still depend on women to make my life better. That’s immediately evident should you drop by the Red Velvet Cake Studio or our Reach Media offices, where 80 percent of the people who […]

One of the things the civil rights movement did best was stay on message with a central goal of ending Jim Crow segregation and racism. That message was delivered by the NAACP, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and of course the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) led by […]

Last week I was on vacation. Like so many of us do this time of year, I tried to take some time off to unwind hoping to be rejuvenated when it was time to return to work. That was hard to do. I could escape work, I could escape getting up before the crack of […]

Protest Plus Policy equals Progress! Last week I received a huge honor, the National Urban League’s “Living Legend” award. The following week, we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, and this weekend, we commemorated the shooting death of Michael Brown a year later. All three events reminded me that right never goes […]

When I was a kid, I would lay around dreaming about being rich. But I quickly realized that unless you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth, you’d have to get up and get to work to make it happen. But as hard as I worked and got fired and worked and got […]