Here's 10 Black-Ass Predictions to Consider Since No One Really Knows What the Hell is Going to Happen in 2019
When it comes to predicting the future, I tend to listen to the wisdom of the black women in my family. Grandmamas, mothers, aunts, play aunts, doesn’t matter, their dreams are damn near unassailable when it comes to predicting your impending future death. (“Baby, I saw you on a train headed straight towards a…
My 'Project Mongoose' Chevrolet Corvair Gets Its Engine and a Good Story
My grandfather, nicknamed Popeye because of his huge forearms, was a wheeler dealer decades before Mike ran off Edd (allegedly). As a kid, he and I got up at the crack of dawn, and scoured the Southern California drive-in swap meets. The Paramount, the Roadium, were just two drive-in swap meets on our weekend circuit.
My Chevrolet Corvair Project Gets Stripped To The Metal As Its Racing Story Begins
Back in 1976, I used to beg my mom each morning to get me to school early, just so I could play an insane inner-city game called Suicide. I was 10 years old, and while the St. Anselm nuns copped a smoke next to the rectory, trying to steady their nerves for yet another day without debauchery*, 50 testosterone-filled…
I'm Fixing Up This Chevy Corvair And Making Up Its Racing History As I Go Along
Why the hell do people buy old-ass cars from the 1960s? They cost too much, for one thing. They’re unreliable to operate as a daily, with their pesky two and four barrels. They stop like shit. And most of the time, they smell like a Shell station. Designed by guys who fought Hitler and Tojo with a half smoked Lucky…
What Does It Mean to Have a ‘Gentrified’ Martin Luther King Jr. When Some Blacks Are the Gentrifiers?
My first real experience with the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. happened in 1980, just 12 years after his tragic assassination in Memphis, Tenn. I was a 14-year-old freshman at Loyola High School, a prestigious Jesuit all-boys school in Los Angeles built on the philosophy that rigorous academic training would…
#TheRootTrip: The Great American Ice Experiment
Willie Wardell owns the Mighty Midget Mart Shell gas station, located at 4936 Albemarle Road in Charlotte, N.C., and he’s been in the convenience store business for the past 40 years. His store has everything that other gas stations in the neighborhood have, and he makes sure to price things competitively.
#TheRootTrip: A Former Tourist Home in SC Has Literally Gone to the (Dead) Dogs
Yeah, so lemme tell you about my trip to Greenville, S.C. My task was to find the Dr. Gibbs Tourist Home, located at 914 Anderson Road, and I was excited because I thought that if this person was a doctor, I was pretty sure that he or she would have a pretty impressive home that could still be standing. And I was…
#TheRootTrip: Former Tourist Home in Atlanta Retains Some Signs of Its Past Glory
In the 1957 Negro Motorist Green Book, the Connally Tourist Home is located just a block away from Morris Brown College in Atlanta and is a multistory home that was common in the late 19th century. But I was interested in it because it was the first tourist home on this trip that I could actually enter.
#TheRootTrip: In Atlanta, a Mystery. Who Was Ma Sutton?
In the short time that I have to research these Green Book spots, the hardest ones tend to be those that were owned by black women. Even when they’re called “famous” or dubbed as “must visits” in historical documents, the details about the lives of these female entrepreneurs are often either lost or hard to find. So…
#TheRootTrip: Chillin’ in Style in Birmingham, Ala.
More chillin’ at a black-owned hotel! This one is the Residence Inn by Marriott Birmingham Downtown at the University of Alabama-Birmingham at 821 20th St. South, and it’s another property held by the black-owned Capstone Development Investment Group.
#TheRootTrip: Martin Luther King Jr. Slept Here
The A.G. Gaston Motel is an important landmark in the civil rights movement and was designated by President Barack Obama as the center of the Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument. Located just a block away from the 16th Street Baptist Church, the site where four black girls lost their lives in 1963 when the Ku…
#TheRootTrip: A Grand Hotel in the Heart of Meridian, Miss.
#TheRootTrip is a series of long, two- to three-hour drives on the highway as I desperately try to get to small towns before sundown. The trip from Jackson, Miss., to Meridian, Miss., happened in the late afternoon, and I could see a thunderstorm approaching as I tried hard to reach my destination before dark.
#TheRootTrip: Try the Pig Ear Sandwich at the Big Apple Inn, Home of Authentic Southern Cooking in Miss.
You can’t visit Jackson, Miss., a surprisingly progressive city in a very conservative state, without checking out the Big Apple Inn Restaurant on 509 N. Farish St. A delightful hole in the wall that reeks of old, black Mississippi, the Big Apple Inn has become a darling of television shows looking for authentic,…
#TheRootTrip: In a Historic District in Jackson, Miss., a Chance at a Rebirth
It was onward to Jackson, Miss., and my first Green Book stop was at the former Shepherds Kitchenette at 604 North Farish St. During Jim Crow segregation, Farish Street was the center of the black business community, home to numerous record companies and restaurants, and it was the original home of Jackson State…
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