Author: Reporter

Josh Gibson became Major League Baseball’s career leader with a .372 batting average, surpassing Ty Cobb’s .367, when Negro Leagues records for more than 2,300 players were incorporated in May after a three-year research project. Gibson’s .466 average for the 1943 Homestead Grays became the season standard, followed by Charlie “Chino” Smith’s .451 for the 1929 New York Lincoln Giants. They overtook the .440 by Hugh Duffy for the National League’s Boston team in 1894. Gibson also became the career leader in slugging percentage (.718) and OPS (1.177), moving ahead of Babe Ruth (.690 and 1.164). “This initiative is...

It was the middle of the night in the summer of 2021 when I finally found the missing piece of my family history. My great-great-great-great grandfather Hewlett Sands, born into slavery in Oyster Bay, New York in 1820, was one of the more than 200,000 names listed on the African American Civil War Memorial in Washington DC. That meant he was a soldier who served in a United States Colored Troops regiment that fought for the Union – and the freedom we still celebrate today. As the screen glowed, a mix of emotions – anxiety, elation, pride – washed...

Due to his extensive overseas travel schedule, President Joe Biden celebrated the Juneteenth holiday a few days early by hosting a concert on the White House South Lawn, with singers including Gladys Knight and Patti LaBelle. “Black history is American history,” President Biden told the crowd. The U.S. President warned that some “old ghosts” in new clothes, a reference to some of his Republican rivals who have revived Confederacy-era doctrine aimed at suppressing people of color, seek to take away their freedoms by making it harder for Black Americans to vote. President Biden’s remarks came after he had just...

Attorneys for the two remaining survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre said they would petition the Oklahoma Supreme Court for a rehearing in the case seeking reparations for one of the worst single acts of violence against Black people in U.S. history. In an 8-1 decision, the state’s highest court in June upheld a decision made by a district court judge in Tulsa last year to dismiss the case. Although the court wrote that the plaintiff’s grievances about the destruction of the Greenwood district, also known as “Black Wall Street,” were legitimate, they did not fall within the...

The U.S. Air Force reported the first data on cancer diagnoses among troops who worked with nuclear missiles and, while the data is only about 25% complete, the service said the numbers were lower than what they expected. The Air Force said so far it had identified 23 cases of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a blood cancer, in the first stage of its review of cancers among service members who operated, maintained or supported silo-based Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles. To identify those cases the Air Force looked at all missile community personnel who used the military health care system, or...