Karen Grigsby Bates
Karen Grigsby Bates is the Senior Correspondent for Code Switch, a podcast that reports on race and ethnicity. A veteran NPR reporter, Bates covered race for the network for several years before becoming a founding member of the Code Switch team. She is especially interested in stories about the hidden history of race in America—and in the intersection of race and culture. She oversees much of Code Switch's coverage of books by and about people of color, as well as issues of race in the publishing industry. Bates is the co-author of a best-selling etiquette book (Basic Black: Home Training for Modern Times) and two mystery novels; she is also a contributor to several anthologies of essays. She lives in Los Angeles and reports from NPR West.
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The Chicago publishing giant that launched Ebony and Jet magazines, and made them a touchstone in African-American life, is closing its doors. It plans a court- supervised sale of its assets.
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Black students at San Francisco State College walked out in a protest that led to the rise of ethnic studies departments at colleges and universities around the country.
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For people of color, "civility" is often a means of containing them, preventing social mobility and preserving the status quo.
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A new book tells how the blinding of a black Army veteran after World War II by a South Carolina police chief helped lead to the desegregation of the U.S. Army.
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One of the protesters in a famous photo of a Mississippi lunch counter sit-in, John Hunter Gray, has died. Gray, a lifelong human rights activist, was 84.
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In these videos, it's black people calling the cops on white ones who are behaving in a socially irresponsible manner: They're not voting.
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In the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, two Americans won medals for the 200-meter race. And then in a move that still echoes, they raised their fists in the black power salute on the podium.
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A new biography of the African-American playwright shows that she was so much more than her most famous work: A Raisin in the Sun.
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Historian Imani Perry looks beyond Hansberry's artistic genius to her involvement in several movements — civil rights, LGBTQ rights, anti-colonialism — ahead of the popular curve.
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Arthur Mitchell was the founding director of the Dance Theater of Harlem, the country's first black ballet company. He died Wednesday at the age of 84.