Word: blackness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...young black woman named Henrietta Lacks was admitted to Johns Hopkins Hospital and given a diagnosis of cervical cancer. During treatment, doctors removed a sample of her tumor and sent it to a research lab without her permission. Lacks died a few months later, but the sample lived on--and on and on. The strain, dubbed HeLa, was the first human tissue to be successfully kept alive as a culture. Since her death, Lacks' cells have been shot into space, infected with tuberculosis and zapped with radiation to test the effects of a nuclear bomb. HeLa helped develop the polio...
...actor finds out that several pestering women have all booked passage on the same boat he's taking to Africa. Perry's culminates with the cast enlisting the audience in a sing-along of Earth, Wind and Fire hits. At the Broadway theater, I didn't see a single black face. At Madison Square Garden, I was just about the only white...
Tyler Perry has for years operated in something of an alternate theater universe. Though best known for his hit movies (starting with Diary of a Mad Black Woman in 2005), top-rated TV series (TBS's House of Payne) and friendship with Oprah Winfrey (with whom he produced the Oscar-nominated film Precious), Perry, 40, may well be the most popular unsung playwright in America. Raised in a poor and abusive home in New Orleans, he staged his first musical play, I Know I've Been Changed, in a former Atlanta church in 1998. Two years later he introduced...
...chastising latecomers in the audience ("The show starts at 8. You move a little slower, you need to leave a little earlier"), joking about a co-star's bad breath and delivering impromptu movie reviews. (He praises Disney's The Princess and the Frog for having a black heroine but laments that she doesn't wind up with a black prince: "Black woman can't even have a black man in animation!") After the curtain call, he spends another 15 minutes talking to the crowd, explaining the background of the show (he wrote it after the death of his mother...
...still outrageously vulnerable to coastal storms. Its levees are too weak, and the wetlands that once protected it from hurricanes continue to melt into the Gulf. But the Lombardi Gras felt like a new beginning for a who-dat city of underdogs--especially coming just days after its black and white residents came together to install new adult leadership in the form of Mayor-elect Mitch Landrieu. Maybe he can combine the bold vision of Saints coach Sean Payton with the brilliant execution of quarterback Drew Brees. It won't mean much if the next storm wipes it all away...