3/14/24

Photo Essay | Black childbirth takes center stage for a young couple from Orange, New Jersey

By Public Square Amplified Team

The act of childbirth is always an intimate one — filled with a host of emotions, from joy to pain.

Using his black and white medium, Public Square Amplified's Brian Branch-Price had the unique opportunity to do what only great photographers can — to almost not exist in the moment yet to be at the center of it. "For them to welcome me into that space was a crazy, wonderful experience," Branch-Price recalled, "It's unusual for that to happen unless the subject has a lot of trust and confidence.”

2/29/24

How the “Free Mumia” movement rocked Black journalists in 1995 and how the case still resonates in 2024: Part 3

By Todd Steven Burroughs

In 2024 and beyond, it might be hard for those who have grown up with the World Wide Web, and social media in particular, to understand that there was not an instant grapevine in 1995 for Black journalists from across the nation to immediately learn about the First Amendment violations of a convicted murderer in Philadelphia who was an affiliate president 15 years prior to the 20th anniversary NABJ convention.

2/15/24

Journalism and advocacy in the 1995 Mumia Abu-Jamal and National Association of Black Journalists controversy: Part 2

By Todd Steven Burroughs

NABJ was an easy target for the “Free Mumia” movement because the traditional professional journalism values of objectivity and detachment, according to the group’s president, prevented it from taking a political position. But this only raised some important questions: Don’t people form organizations in order to be able to take a collective stand? Doesn’t the organization provide a cover, a collective shelter of the results of private votes, in order to do what you could not get away with as an individual? How come, at least for NABJ, the situation seemed to work in the reverse?

2/15/24

New Jersey medical student calls out the American health care system

By Nazia Shaheed

Doctors pledge to do no harm. So, as a genocide takes place before our very eyes, the silence of our medical institutions has led to widespread disgust and shame on the part of medical students, residents, and attending physicians. As medical students, many of us got into this field with the same goal: to help people. However, watching this blatant hypocrisy from the institutions and individuals that I would otherwise respect is horrifying.

2/1/24

Mumia Abu-Jamal turns 70 this year: A look back at the 1995 “Free Mumia” movement’s clash with the objectivity of the National Association of Black Journalists

By Todd Steven Burroughs

The professional maxim in the journalism profession, at least in mainstream quarters, is that a journalist should never be part of the story he or she is covering. It’s a challenge to the mainstream journalist, who always has to draw the fine line between observing and participating. For two decades from its founding in 1975 to 1995, the National Association of Black Journalists had established clear boundaries. Under public and sustained criticism from many loud radicals, it had to repeatedly explain to members of Black communities that its mission was different than that of the more advocacy-oriented Black press, while simultaneously explaining to white newsroom managers that their coverage needed the input of Black perspectives.

11/30/23

How you can apply the true lesson of 2020’s racial justice uprising

By Matt Dragon

One of the lessons people might have incorrectly drawn from the 2020 uprising around racial justice in the United States was that it was spurred by a sharp, rapid increase in police violence directed toward Black people. Protesters around the globe were attributing the murder of George Floyd, while technically at the knee of Officer Derek Chauvin, to the entire Minneapolis Police Department and, more widely, to a system of policing that allows the police to enact violence on the communities they’ve sworn to protect and serve. The video of the killing, courageously recorded by a 17-year-old woman, showed millions of Americans what really goes on when an initial police statement announces a “medical incident.”

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