President Donald Trump, right, bows his head as Relentless Church Pastor John Gray, left, says a prayer during a meeting with inner city pastors in the Cabinet Room of the White House in Washington, Wednesday, Aug. 1, 2018. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik) On Wednesday, August 1, President Donald Trump met with prominent black clergy at the […]
Read more "Don’t Sit, Stand"Last August, as the steam gathered behind the national sentiments of anger following the death of Michael Brown, I kept waiting for the moment that something or someone was going to grab the reins and take it to the next level. As the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter emerged and assumed a life of its own, I kept […]
Read more "Waiting on the Movement"“To put it bluntly, the likes of Pharrell and Raven-Symoné can afford to declare their independence from blackness.” In April of this year, Pharrell Williams declared the “new Black” in an interview with Oprah Winfrey by saying: The “new black” doesn’t blame other races for our issues. The “new black” dreams and realizes that it’s not a pigmentation; […]
Read more "The Millennium Negro: The “New Black”"Dear White People Concept Trailer from Justin Simien on Vimeo. In the vein of “Higher Learning” and “School Daze” there is a spoof video that is premiering at 2014 Sundance called “Dear White People” highlighting the interactions of black faces in the white space of ivy league-esque collegiate education. I watched the trailer, and of […]
Read more "Dear Black People…"Editor’s Note: Below is an excerpt from the sermon I preached this past Sunday, August 25, 2013 as the country celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The scripture text was Acts 2:17 through 21 as follows: In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will […]
Read more "Tell Them About the Dream"I really don’t write about sports, but here goes. Let me put a few things in full disclosure before I start: I got the idea of “reinvention” from the homie Kyle Brooks. I’m from Chicago, and will always rep the home teams. That is to say, I’m not some super fan of either the Spurs nor […]
Read more "The Autopsy Report: Lebron James and the Reinvention of Hate"I know it has been some time since “The Great Gatsby (2013)” has debuted and was panned by a few critics, but I certainly would like to offer some discourse to the movie from my perspective. I remember reading The Great Gatsby, the novel my sophomore year of high school, and I actually did pull the […]
Read more "The American Blackness of The Great Gatsby"Taylor Branch lifted the Rev. Vernon Johns out of historical obscurity when he published his famous tome on the modern Civil Rights era Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63 when he opened the book with the biography of him. His major contribution to the Civil Rights movement as a whole was his pastorate […]
Read more "An Original Uppity Negro: Rev. Vernon Johns"When we think of black themed television networks, our minds usually drift toward Black Entertainment Television–BET and it conjures a myriad of mixed sentiments. A generation divided by Robert Johnson years and the post-Robert Johnson years remember BET fondly and others that regard it as the sugary snacks of hip hop culture; that which our […]
Read more "“Reed Between the Lines” is Asking us to do Just That"As a rule here at the Uppity Negro Network, I generally stick to the tried and true topics of controversy: race, religion and politics. Those are always sure to bring in readers and are good topics to try and parse for the sake of bettering humanity. But, as has been the case over the years, […]
Read more "Off The Beaten Path: Men’s Fashion"
Joshua Lawrence Lazard 