A special evening honoring filmmaker Julie Dash, director of the acclaimed “The Rosa Parks Story” (which premiered at the Detroit Film Theatre in 2002), takes place Jan. 24 at the Detroit Institute of Arts. During the evening, which is organized in cooperation with the Wayne State University Department of Communication, Dash will introduce her 1991 classic “Daughters of the Dust,” a portrait of the Gullah c ...

Artist Village, located on Lahser Road on Detroit’s west side, has the longest running open mic poetry club in Detroit. ...

Eleven-time Detroit Music Award winner Nadir Omowale presents Nadir’s Electric Lounge: A Multimedia Funk Experience and live concert recording Feb. 2 at NextWave Media Lab, 950 Stephenson Hwy., in Troy. Showtime is at 8 p.m. ...

When then-National Newspaper Publishers Association Chairman Danny Bakewell, Sr. asked me to emcee the Black Press Week luncheon at the National Press Club in 2011, I had no idea I would be witnessing history. At the urging of Wilmington Journal publisher Mary Alice Thatch, the NNPA decided to launch a national campaign to win pardons for the Wilmington Ten, a group of activists who were falsely convicted a ...

The new year begins with a bad hangover from 2012’s inane debate over the “fiscal cliff.” The furious debate focused only on how much damage would be done to the economy and who would pay the price, how much and what would be cut, who would pay higher taxes and who would suffer the most. ...

Congressman John Boehner was re-elected speaker of the House of Representatives with a narrow vote. Needing 218 votes, he barely clinched it with 220. His narrow vote reflects the fact that no Democrat would vote for him and that many Republicans are disillusioned of him. Perhaps it also reflects the fact that he has so poorly comported himself that he does not deserve reelection. ...

The U.S. Postal Service is commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, which President Abraham Lincoln signed on Jan. 1, 1863, with a 2013 stamp. To celebrate this milestone, the Postal Service introduced a limited-edition Forever Stamp at The National Archives in Washington, D.C., which houses the historic document. ...

In what civil rights leaders across the nation are calling a “significant” moment in the civil rights movement, North Carolina Gov. Beverly Perdue has granted individual pardons of actual innocence to members of the Wilmington Ten. ...

In the wake of the unthinkable carnage that claimed the lives of 20 children ages 6 and 7 and six adults in Newtown, Conn., the lugubrious and grief-stricken nation promptly erupted in a furious debate over the question of what must now be done to safeguard children from baneful gun violence in schools across the country, in tank towns and big cities, alike. ...

When an emergency financial manager was imposed over Detroit in 2009 and he quickly assumed dictatorial powers, we did not get really angry, gather en masse and force the issue. Instead we played by the rules and filed a lawsuit without real funding and waited a year for it to wind through the courts as our district was plundered. ...