Trailblazing Essence editor on Sarah Vaughan, Newark riots and her mother, a ‘Force of Beauty’
Updated Feb 18, 2021;
Posted Feb 17, 2021
Mikki Taylor at the 2016 Essence Black Women In Hollywood awards luncheon in Beverly Hills. She was beauty and cover director at the magazine for 30 years, working with former first lady Michelle Obama and the Obama family, Beyoncé, Rosa Parks and more. She talks about her Newark childhood in Force of Beauty, a new memoir for Audible. Rich Polk | Getty Images
Facebook Share
For Mikki Taylor, Take Your Daughter to Work Day meant accompanying her mother, Modina Davis, to “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1959.
Film Club: âWhat It Means to Be Black in Americaâ
Last year The Times published a collection of six short films for Black History Month. How do these films help us learn about, recognize and celebrate Black American lives, culture and history?
Video
-0:00
Black Panthers Revisited
This short documentary explores what we can learn from the Black Panther party in confronting police violence 50 years later.
IDs / TIMECODES AUDIO / VIDEO
OPEN - FADE UP SOT
Protest Montage
âHands up! Donât shoot!â 2014 V/O Stanley Nelson
The stories in the news today remind me of the sentiments of almost 50 years ago, when many young black people felt that policing for them was unfair .
Join
Black academics, writers, musicians, and artists traveled from all across the country and world to participate in the Harlem Renaissance an intellectual revival movement that occurred in the 1920s in the northern Manhattan neighborhood. Individuals seeking to visit the area to interact and work with the great thinkers of Harlem, however, had to tackle the “hotel problem,” as Harlem historian and resident Eric K. Washington puts it. As the Harlem Renaissance was blossoming in New York City, so were Jim Crow and segregation laws that did not allow Black and white Americans to sleep in the same hotel. The Hotel Olga solved the “hotel problem” and became the unofficial home to the movement.
The Green Book was created by black mailman Victor Hugo Green to ensure that black families could travel safely in an age when many white business owners felt it was perfectly acceptable to refuse black patrons. New York Public Library Digital Collections/HowStuffWorks
Growing up in Baltimore in the 1950s, the author and playwright Calvin Alexander Ramsey never really questioned why his family, like all other black families he knew, would leave for vacation car trips at 2 or 3 in the morning. And he never thought twice about the fact that the family always slept at private homes instead of hotels, used the side of the road as a restroom and packed their own food with them for the length of the journey.
USA TODAY
Amid all the chaos 2020 (and early 2021) have collectively brought upon us, February reassuringly marks Black History Month.
It s a time of celebration, reflection and learning about key Black figures and events that helped shape how the United States as we know it came to be. And yes, as much as we love Harriet Tubman and Martin Luther King Jr., Black history is not limited to the five people we learned about in high school history class.
For some Americans, last summer s nationwide Black Lives Matter protests marked the first time they ve been faced with the reality that racism still exists in the United States. It s important to know that these issues didn t spring up suddenly with the death of George Floyd in May 2020, but have been brewing since the founding of America.