#BlackLivesMatter Movement Takes Off
'Selma': 50 Years After Edmund Pettus Bridge March
Film director Ava DuVernay's "Selma," officially released in 2014, played well into this year up through and including March, when the 50th anniversary of a pivotal scene in her movie was re-enacted on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama. On "Bloody Sunday," March 7, 1965, more than 600 civil rights marchers, led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., headed east out of Selma, Ala., on Route 80, where they were beaten back by police. The 2015 march was peaceful, and a reminder that work in civil rights isn't over, even five decades later.
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Mizzou President Resigns In Face of Campus Activism
This is the last year racism on the campus of the University of Missouri would be tolerated. At least that's what campus activists hope after their action—which drew the support of faculty and even the school's famed football team and coaches—led to the resignation of the school's president and chancellor. The students were protesting the administration's refusal to investigate and initiate consequences for frequent and persistent acts of racism against the university's students of color, including the student body president.
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Yale Lecturer Resigns After Halloween Message
Mizzou wasn't the only university receiving resignation letters. In addition to resignations from the top administration at Mizzou, rising and unrelenting student protests against institutional racism and white privilege resulted in the resignations of many. The latest holdout, a lecturer in child development at Yale. Erika Christakis wrote a response to a call from university's student affairs warning students against wearing insensitive costumes for Halloween. "Is there no room any more for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious, a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive?" she wrote. "American universities were once a safe space not only for maturation but also for a certain regressive, or even transgressive, experience; increasingly, it seems, they have become places of censure and prohibition."
PHOTOGRAPH BY: Yale College
Ta-Nehisi Coates Wins National Book Award
Ta-Nehisi Coates won the National Book Award in non-fiction for the beautiful, sad, angry and very in-this-moment book-length letter to his son, "Between the World and Me." The longtime Atlantic contributor has been at the forefront of talk about race and racism in the U.S. and gained wide attention in 2014 for his provocative essay "The Case for Reparations."
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'Brown Girl Dreaming' Wins Newbury
Jacqueline Woodson's semi-autobiographic YA novel "Brown Girl Dreaming" received the highest honor for American children's fiction, the Newbury Award. "Brown Girl Dreaming" tells the story of Woodson's childhood, in verse. In her poems, she tells what it's like to grow up African American in the '60s and '70s in both New York and South Carolina, where she explains she lived with the remnants of Jim Crow.
PHOTOGRAPH BY: Amazon
Misty Copeland Named Principal Dancer for ABT
With her widely followed journey to become one of the most recognized ballerinas, 32-year-old Misty Copeland was promoted to principal dancer at the American Ballet Theater. She is the first black female to hold this title New York-based company's 75-year history.
PHOTOGRAPH BY: RexUSA
