ANNAPOLIS, Md. (AP) — Maryland will create a commission to study potential reparations for slavery after lawmakers voted Tuesday to override a veto by Gov. Wes Moore — currently the nation’s only Black governor — that disappointed many fellow Democrats.

Moore said in his veto letter in May that it was a difficult decision to veto the bill, which was a priority of the Legislative Black Caucus of Maryland. But he wrote there has been enough study of the legacy of slavery, and it was now time to “focus on the work itself” to address it.

But Democrats who control both chambers of the Maryland General Assembly decided the commission was needed to better examine how to do that.

“This topic isn’t easy, but, again, without formal study, reparations risk being dismissed as symbolic or unconstitutional, regardless of moral merit,” said Sen. Charles Sydnor, a Democrat.

Muscogee (Creek) Freedmen this week asked the tribal nation’s Supreme Court to enforce its ruling granting them citizenship after the nation’s executive orders have prevented the issuing of new citizenship cards.

“In issuing (the executive order), Chief (David) Hill has overstepped, encroaching on the Citizenship Board’s independence, violating his duty to uphold the law, and usurping the court’s authority,” the filing reads.

It comes nearly three months after a July 23 ruling granted full citizenship to the descendants of people who were enslaved by the tribe. The July ruling also overturned the nation’s “by-blood” requirement, which served as a basis to deny Freedmen citizenship applications.

OAKLAND, Miss. — Grocery store owner Marquitrice Mangham hurries out of the sweltering August heat of the Mississippi Delta and enters her newly opened Farmacy Marketplace.

She arrives about an hour before the doors open at 10 a.m.

It’s a quiet Friday morning in Oakland, Mississippi, except for the occasional screech of tires from semitrucks passing by on Highway 51. Oakland, fewer than 30 miles from her hometown of Webb, is home to about 400 residents, more than half of whom are Black.

Inside the store, Mangham greets and praises her assistant manager, Kini Bradford-Jefferson. She emphasizes that without her, the store couldn’t operate. They laugh, ask each other how they are doing and tidy up the 3,000-square-foot space.

Until April, Oakland had been without a grocery store.

In rural areas, particularly in the Delta, residents face some of the highest rates of food insecurity and unemployment in the state, resulting in poor health outcomes such as obesity, hypertension, and diabetes. These communities have high populations of Black people. They often struggle to attract grocery stores and are overwhelmed by a striking growth of dollar stores.

Around 14% of Americans — more than 47 million people — were food insecure at some point during 2023, according to an Associated Press analysis of U.S. Census Bureau and Feeding America data.

​​Mississippi had a food insecurity rate of 18%, higher than the national rate.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Cloud Computing has revolutionized how we live and work. But the dirty truth is that the warehouses full of computers that power AI threaten the progress we've made to protect people from pollutants. These data centers and the plants that power them typically burn fuels that emit hazardous chemicals that cause cancer and other health issues into the air the local community breathes.

Elon Musk and his company xAI are poisoning Black communities in TN and MS, just to make more money. While it's not new that data centers threaten to erode our climate progress, xAI's disregard for laws and regulations meant to keep people safe from pollution is unprecedented.

Tech companies and the billionaires who own them must be held accountable. As the country continues to progress in AI, we must ensure that frontline communities aren't the ones paying the price.

The newly established Native Playwrights PDX, co-organized by director Amber Kay Ball, Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, is providing Native theater makers a platform to accurately and respectfully tell the stories of modern Indigenous people. Support from this community funded arts project will combat the lack of Indigenous representation in media while amplifying the work of up-and-coming playwrights and directors.

Native Playwrights PDX was co-organized by Ball in 2024. After hosting a staged reading for their self-written play “Finding Bigfoot” in collaboration with the Fertile Ground Festival at Barbie’s Village last year, Ball, who uses the pronouns she/they, felt that it was more impactful and accessible to showcase work in a community space rather than a major theater.

“It felt more significant than presenting it in a theater to me at the moment when I could just showcase it with community,” Ball recalled.

Since that first staged reading, the idea has only grown.

The U.S. student movement in solidarity with Palestine is facing ferocious repression as the Trump administration revokes student visas en masse. Masked federal agents roam around looking to snatch students and faculty off the streets and send them to jail for their activism, including their mere beliefs. One of the students targeted is Momodou Taal, a graduate student at Cornell University who led pro-Palestine activism there and was suspended twice by the university. A dual citizen of the United Kingdom and the Gambia, he joined another graduate student and a faculty member in suing the Trump administration for allegedly violating their First and Fifth Amendment rights by punishing speech and quashing political dissent. On March 21, Taal’s lawyers were notified that the State Department had revoked Taal’s student visa after Immigration and Customs Enforcement condemned his “disruptive action” and ICE requested that he turn himself in. Instead, Taal left the country on his own terms, “free” and with his “head held high,” and continues his struggle on behalf of a free Palestine, upholding the Pan-Africanist tradition.

Taal and Hammer & Hope editor Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò spoke in April 2025.

On the walls of the gallery, Keni “Arts” Davis’s watercolors show Altadena before and after the fires. There is a local hardware store, a beloved diner, the quirky local Bunny Museum, which held tens of thousands of rabbit-related items.

Then, in gentle strokes of paint, there is the wreckage of each place: rubble, charred beams, burnt-out cars. Davis labels each of these images “BFA”, beauty from ashes.

Those post-fire ruins are gone now, too: Altadena, a historic Black community in Los Angeles that lost nearly 10,000 structures, including more than 6,000 homes, in January’s Eaton fire, is slowly being prepared for rebuilding.

“Now all the rubble is gone, and it’s just flattened out,” said Dominique Clayton, the curator of Ode to ’Dena: Black Artistic Legacies of Altadena, a long-running exhibit at the California African American Museum. “I’m so glad he painted the before and after. Now those buildings have been demolished.”

Ode to ’Dena aims to capture the rich creative legacy of Altadena, a community that for decades nourished Black artists, performers, writers and activists, from Eldridge Cleaver and Sidney Poitier to Octavia Butler. The small town, nestled in the hills to the north of Los Angeles, offered Black families an early chance at home ownership in a region long defined by racial segregation and redlining.

Locals immediately feared that the gentrification of Altadena would be accelerated by the destruction, and that the pre-fire community would be pushed out and longtime Black residents scattered, while the town was rebuilt for wealthier newcomers.

But Altadena’s close-knit community immediately rallied to prevent this double destruction, drawing on a wide range of allies and supporters. While Donald Trump chose not to visit fire survivors in Altadena, limiting his presidential tour to the destruction in the wealthier Pacific Palisades, organizations such as the NAACP and BET Media raised funds, and multiple arts institutions, including Frieze LA, stepped up to document the effects of the fires and highlight the work of artists who had lost their homes and studios.

The California African American Museum exhibit, which runs through October, is part of this broader effort. The show highlights not only the prominent Black visual artists with connections to Altadena, but also the deep connections among them. Several of the artists have multiple generations of their family in the show, including textile, performance and portraiture artist Kenturah Davis, whose father’s watercolors and mother Mildred “Peggy” Davis’s quilt work are both included. The oldest artist on display, the assemblage artist and printmaker Betye Saar, is 98 years old. The youngest, Kenturah Davis’s son Micah Zuri, is two years old.