When Montmartre was Harlem-on-the-Seine

After the Great War, a new kind of music began to waft through the winding streets of lower Montmartre. Unrestrained, audacious, with a potent syncopated rhythm unlike anything ever heard in Europe. It was the music of Black Americans who had started to move into the neighborhood. For a brief time, far away from Jim…

Discovering Black Outsider Art in a Whitewashed World

Their abilities don’t come from any artistic establishment. They didn’t have any formal training and they were not influenced by other mainstream artists. Hailing from places like Mississippi, Tallapoosa, and other rural pockets of the deep south, they’re the African American Outsider and Folk artists whose voices and colour palettes explored a world that wasn’t…

The Dapper Rebels of Los Angeles, 1966

In the summer of 1965, riots broke out in the Watts neighborhood of southern Los Angeles. Over a six-day period, 34 people were killed, 1,032 injured and over 3,438 arrests were made. In 1966, LIFE magazine revisited the site of the worst riots America had ever seen in its history. The photo essay depicting the…

Let’s Raise a Glass to America’s Black Wall Street

Something else they forgot to tell us about in history class: Black Wall Street. Why is it that our textbooks neglected to tell us about the African Americans who opened their own banks, did business with the Rockefellers and prospered as entrepreneurs decades before the Civil Rights Movement? Yes indeed, long before desegregation, America had…

Girl Friends, Inc: The African American Social Clubs of Yesteryear

It all started over a pot of stew in the summer of 1927. Eunice Shreeves rang a fews friends to come over to her New York home, break bread, and make a few more memories before heading their separate ways for college. The Harlem Renaissance was at its peak, and these ladies were headed to…

Preserved Moments of Historical, Indisputable Black Style

I haven’t done one of these style compendiums in a while, so this is long overdue. And this is also for all those internet retrospectives on vintage style that don’t include a single Black face. It was a hard task narrowing down my favourites from thousands of found snapshots floating around out there on the world…

This 1930s Quartet Didn’t Know It, But They Were Rap’s First Recorded Artists

Turns out, almost a century ago, a special group of men was spitting verses about Noah’s Ark, Ezekiel’s wheel, and every other juicy anecdote in the Bible. These days, we call it “Gospel rap,” and hail it as a genre pioneered by a 1930s US gospel group, “The Jubalaires,” who paved the way for 1990s…

Reviving the Art of Cutaway with a Femme Twist

We’ve always got time for some incredible cutaway art. There’s just something about the attention to detail – the pure voyeurism – that makes it the ultimate eye candy. Today’s escape comes courtesy of American artist Hilary Harkness, whose cutaways are a veritable Where’s Waldo for adults, filled with raucous scenes of women dominating traditionally…

Take the “Fresh Prince” Throne & Sleepover at his Bel-Air Mansion

Without a doubt, “The Fresh Prince” had one of the most enviable pads on TV. Well, ’90s kids rejoice, because now Airbnb wants you to have a chance at living the sweet life just like Will Smith. “The actor and entrepreneur is adding [us] to his long resume,” reads Airbnb’s announcement, “and opening the doors…

Where are the Black Archeologists?

“Why are there so few Black American archeologists?” asked Maria Franklin in response to a landmark 1997 survey which found that only 2 out of 1500 Archeological respondents identified as Black. Years later, the status of her question posed in a paper published by the Cambridge University Press in 2015 – and its answer –…