Author: Reporter

At first glance, it looks like an aerial photo of a cemetery destroyed by war, with charred coffins ripped from broken concrete vaults and arched marble tombstones flattened by a bomb blast. Then, the viewer begin to discern details: the coffins and vaults are actually parts of a keyboard. Instead of names and dates, the apparent tombstones are inscribed with words like “vibrato” and “third harmonic.” “It looks like a graveyard,” photographer Frank Stewart said. Stewart’s ghostly photograph of a New Orleans church organ ravaged by the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina is part of a career retrospective of his...

The site of a transient motel in Detroit where three young Black men were killed, allegedly by White police officers, during the city’s bloody 1967 race riot is receiving a historic marker. A dedication ceremony was held in July at a park several miles north of downtown where the Algiers Motel once stood. As parts of Detroit burned in one of the bloodiest race riots in U.S. history, police and members of the National Guard raided the motel and its adjacent Manor House on July 26, 1967, after reports of gunfire in the area. The bodies of Auburey Pollard,...

The U.S. Navy has exonerated 256 Black sailors in July who were found to be unjustly punished in 1944 following a horrific port explosion that killed hundreds of service members and exposed racist double standards among the then-segregated ranks. On July 17, 1944, munitions being loaded onto a cargo ship detonated, causing secondary blasts that ignited 5,000 tons of explosives at Port Chicago naval weapons station near San Francisco. The explosion killed 320 sailors and civilians, nearly 75% of whom were Black, and injured another 400 personnel. Surviving Black sailors had to pick up the human remains and clear...

For the nation’s bicycle shops, the past few years have probably felt like the business version of the Tour de France, with numerous twists and turns testing their endurance. Early in the pandemic, a surge of interest in cycling pushed sales up 64% to $5.4 billion in 2020, according to the retail tracking service Circana. It was not unheard of for some shops to sell 100 bikes or more in a couple of days. The boom did not last. Hobbled by pandemic-related supply chain issues, the shops sold all their bikes and had trouble restocking. Now, inventory has caught...