Published April 25, 2018 in the St. Louis American
By Jamala Rogers

Pervasive and persistent racial profiling of African-American men is only part of their reality. When Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson entered a Philly Starbucks for a business meeting, it took all of two minutes for the police to come and arrest them for trespassing. (It took Cleveland police two seconds to murder 12-year-old Tamir Rice.) The Starbucks incident took me back to the recent study by the Equality of Opportunity Project that re-iterated a troublesome fact: Black men are trapped in a vicious cycle, a no-win situation.

Researchers from Harvard and Stanford universities, along with the U.S. Census Bureau, tracked 20 million children born between 1978-1983. The take-aways in The Equality of Opportunity Report are depressing. The anxiety of black parents and guardians raising black boys surely skyrocketed. Blood pressures probably went up. Read more

Published April 5, 2018 by the St. Louis American
Jamala Rogers

“So my bet is on the young people who are in motion based upon the latest mass shooting. The students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School have lit a prairie fire.”

This was part of the opening paragraph in my March 5 column, ”Guns, youth and this bettin’ woman.” And the young people didn’t disappoint. The March for our Lives was the convergence of one of the largest marches on record in Washington, D.C. The youth-led march of nearly 800,000 was larger than Trump’s inaugural ceremony as the 45th U.S. president.

The youth from Douglas High in Parkland, Florida did not start anything. Theirs is a cry for justice that is blended with many cries for justice over time. They should understand the soil of this country is soaked with the blood, sweat and tears of many before them, fighting for their own righteous causes. Read more

Published March 14, 2018 in celebration of The St. Louis American’s 90th Anniversary
By Jamala Rogers

“The Black Press was never intended to be objective because it didn’t see the white press being objective. It often took a position. It had an attitude. This was a press of advocacy. There was news, but the news had an admitted and a deliberate slant.”

The above words came from Phyllis Garland when she was interviewed almost 30 years ago for a PBS documentary entitled “The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords.” While she may have been summing up the Black Press, it also accurately describes my perspective as a writer for The St. Louis American. Read more