Positive Headlines
The architects of today's progress. The victories of the spirit. A curated feed of the news that deserves attention.
Opal Lee: The Grandmother of Juneteenth
At eighty-nine, she started walking. Five years later, at ninety-four, she watched Juneteenth become a federal holiday because of her.
Amanda Gorman: The Hill We Climb
Amanda Gorman read 'The Hill We Climb' at the 2021 inauguration — and, in five minutes, changed what American poetry was allowed to be for.
Nikole Hannah-Jones and the 1619 Project
Nikole Hannah-Jones's 1619 Project reframed the founding date of American history — and produced the most consequential public-history argument of the last twenty years.
Kendrick Lamar and the First Hip-Hop Pulitzer
Kendrick Lamar's DAMN. became the first hip-hop album ever to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music — a formal recognition that a seventy-five-year-old institution had been lagging the culture by at least forty years.
Bryan Stevenson's Legacy Museum
Bryan Stevenson's Equal Justice Initiative built the first national memorial to lynching victims in American history — a structural argument that memory is a prerequisite for justice.
The National Museum of African American History and Culture
It took a hundred years, three presidential administrations, and an act of Congress. The nineteenth Smithsonian museum opened on the National Mall on September 24, 2016.
Stacey Abrams and the Reorganization of Georgia
Stacey Abrams's decade of Georgia voter-registration organizing produced, in 2020 and 2021, the clearest single example in modern American politics of a state demographic base converted into a political coalition through sustained institutional work.
The HBCU Renaissance
Historically Black colleges and universities are experiencing the most substantial period of renewed investment and enrollment in their modern history.