It started as a collective expression of pride. A group of young women at the School for Creative Studies in Durham, N.C., decided to wear head wraps—also called geles—to align with and honor their culture at the start of Black History Month. Instead, they say, administrators warned that they were in violation of the dress…

She was born in Notasulga, Ala., but she didn’t like the way her story started, so she rewrote it and claimed Eatonville, Fla., as her birthplace instead. She wasn’t too partial to 1891, the year her mother delivered her, so she remixed it, and for the rest of her life, she took liberties with the…

Dear Former Employer, Welcome to my independence day. You actually instituted it. Three years ago I walked into your suite on the seventh floor of that glassy office building as I had every workday at 9 a.m. for nearly two years. Before I could go to the kitchenette to fill my water cup, I was…

How long has it been since you wrote a letter? Not an inbox message, not an email, not a mega-marathon text that breaks itself up into five installments, but a dear-you, love-me letter? The Beautiful Project, a Durham, N.C.-based collective shifting how black women and girls see themselves and how they’re portrayed in the media,…

In A Burst of Light, her aptly titled collection of essays, Audre Lorde famously wrote, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” Almost 30 years after she put that oft-quoted, oft-referenced and oft-memed thought to paper, black women are still trying to figure out what…

She had soulful eyes. Her face was an effortless kind of pretty, accented by a sunny-bright smile and a soft, suede complexion. But in all of the photos of Cherica Adams—those throwback pictures of her with beehived, sky-touching hair, the signature style of the ’90s that she’d have probably rather forgotten she’d worn, and the…

Listening God, When the murderer who embodied evil visited his bloodthirst on the good people gathered at Emanuel AME, a 5-year-old girl saved herself by lying motionless on the floor, pretending to be dead so that she could live. In the familiarity of a church where she’d been blanketed in love, she witnessed the ferociousness…

At the beginning of the year, the viral video of the moment that everyone was talking about showed an unsupervised boy wreaking all kinds of hell inside a Tallahassee, Fla., Dollar General store. For three recorded minutes and the untold number before he was on camera, he smacked plastic trash cans and laundry baskets from…

Like many sisters, Wykesha Reid looked in her mirror and longed for a bigger butt. Nature had carved her curves, but she thought that enhancing what she’d already been gifted with would make her even more attractive. Her family says she visited a salon in Dallas for a first, then a second and then a…