Wellsraven

He Was Convicted of Raping Alice Sebold. Then the Case Unraveled.

In 1981, best-selling author Alice Sebold was raped by a stranger when she was an 18-year-old freshman at Syracuse University. Five months later, she spotted 20-year-old Marine Anthony Broadwater on the street and had “no doubt whatsoever” he was her rapist.

Corina Knoll, Karen Zraick, and Alexandra Alter, reporting for The New York Times:

But when it came time for the police lineup, Ms. Sebold, who is white, looked at the Black men before her and indicated that her attacker was the last person in the row, Number Five. Mr. Broadwater was Number Four. She would insist an hour later that the two men had looked identical to her.

Broadwater was nonetheless charged with eight felony counts, convicted after a two-day trial, and went on to spend 16 years in prison. He always maintained his innocence and never stopped trying to clear his name, to point of sending $1000 to Johnnie Cochran, hoping he would take on the case.

Ms. Sebold would go on to write “The Lovely Bones,” a novel about a 14-year-old girl who is raped and murdered. Published in 2002, it reached the top of the New York Times best-seller list, selling more than 10 million copies before eventually being adapted into a film.

With the success of The Lovely Bones, readers discovered Sebold’s 1999 memoir, Lucky, in which she told the story of her rape in great detail. So much detail in fact that when a disbarred lawyer-turned-film producer began adapting the book into a movie earlier this year, he found it hard to believe.

That’s when things finally started to turn around for Broadwater.

With the death of bell hooks, a generation of feminists lost a foundational figure

Author, activist, and cultural critic bell hooks passed away on Wednesday after an extended illness at age 69.

Lisa B. Thompson, writing for NPR:

Discovering bell hooks changed the lives of countless Black women and girls. After picking up one of her many titles – Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center; Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics; Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism – the world suddenly made sense. She reordered the universe by boldly gifting us with the language and theories to understand who we were in an often hostile and alienating society.

Georgia Republicans purge Black Democrats from county election boards

James Oliphant and Nathan Layne, reporting for Reuters:

The panel in Spalding, a rural patch south of Atlanta, is one of six county boards that Republicans have quietly reorganized in recent months through similar county-specific state legislation. The changes expanded the party’s power over choosing members of local election boards ahead of the crucial midterm Congressional elections in November 2022. […]

The Georgia restructurings are part of a national Republican effort to expand control over election administration in the wake of Trump’s false voter-fraud claims.

The Invisible Toll of Fibroids on Black Women

Patrice Peck, writing for the Times:

After years of feeling brushed off by her doctors, N. Jamiyla Chisholm, 45, remembered crying after her first consultation with a Black gynecologist, who diagnosed and later removed her fibroids. […]

For unknown reasons, Black women are two to three times more likely than white women to have uterine fibroids, and are more likely to have larger and more numerous tumors and develop them earlier in life. Black women are also significantly more likely to have debilitating symptoms that interfere with work, relationships and social and physical activities — which can leave them feeling fearful, depressed, helpless and alone.

Immunologist Kizzmekia Corbett’s work represents the best of what science offered us in 2021

Dasia Moore profiles Corbett for The Boston Globe:

A leading researcher on coronavirus spike proteins and mRNA vaccine technology long before the COVID-19 pandemic emerged, Corbett’s work proved critical to developing vaccines in record time. For a year and a half, she worked around-the-clock alongside her team at the National Institutes of Health, where she was a research fellow prior to her appointment at Harvard, to develop a highly-effective coronavirus vaccine in collaboration with Moderna.

Denzel Washington, Man on Fire

Maureen Dowd speaks with Denzel for the Times:

Mr. Washington talked about working with the late Chadwick Boseman last year on his final film, “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.”

Even before he met Mr. Boseman, Mr. Washington had agreed to Phylicia Rashad’s request to help pay the young actor’s tuition, along with eight other students at Howard University, to go to a summer acting program in England.

Why we don’t see Denzel everywhere, all the time:

“If they see you free all week, they won’t pay to see you on the weekend,” the star said. “I don’t tweet. I don’t have Instagram. I embrace my inner analog.”

Dowd says Denzel has been more publicly spiritual lately.

“The enemy is the inner me,” he said. “The Bible says in the last days — I don’t know if it’s the last days, it’s not my place to know — but it says we’ll be lovers of ourselves. The No. 1 photograph today is a selfie, ‘Oh, me at the protest.’ ‘Me with the fire.’ ‘Follow me.’ ‘Listen to me.’

“We’re living in a time where people are willing to do anything to get followed. What is the long or short-term effect of too much information? It’s going fast and it can be manipulated obviously in a myriad of ways. And people are led like sheep to slaughter.”

In heaven, he said, “there are going to be two lines, the long line and the short line, and I’m interested in being in the short line.”

Denzel’s latest, The Tragedy of Macbeth, opens widely in theaters on Christmas Day.

Mahershala Ali Breaks Down His Career, from ‘Moonlight’ to ‘Swan Song’

Vanity Fair:

“Something that I’d always been doing was writing poetry and doing these poetry slams and things of that nature. That just led to me being in an acting class, honestly because I didn’t wanna take the second semester of Spanish. So I figured like, Yo, let me go ahead and take this acting class and see how it goes, and it worked out.”

Ali produced and stars in Swan Song, out today in theaters and on Apple TV+.

Nadifa Mohamed’s ‘The Fortune Men’ Re-creates the Life of a Man Wrongfully Convicted of Murder

Wadzanai Mhute, reviews The Fortune Men for Oprah Daily:

In her third book, The Fortune Men, Nadifa Mohamed re-creates the life of Mahmood Mattan, a Somali seaman wrongfully convicted of the 1952 murder of Lily Volpert in Cardiff, Wales. Mattan’s story became a 17-year preoccupation for Mohamed after reading a news story on the case. Her novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize this year, and it’s not hard to see why: It’s a riveting tale in which Mohamed brings to life a 1950s port city and the injustice that occurred there.

The Legion Field Kickball League

Photographer Tamika Moore, in a photo essay that looks like a whole lot of fun for The Undefeated and Getty Images:

After facing a year like no other being forced to stay inside due to the coronavirus pandemic, Birmingham, Alabama, residents were looking to find normality, get back outside and enjoy safe activities. The city responded by creating the Legion Field Kickball Classic, where 22 adult coed teams competed for six weeks and brought out a few of Birmingham’s favorite vendors.

Photographer Spotlight: Abdi Ibrahim

Anna Schneider, writing for Booooooom:

Based in Los Angeles, Ibrahim shoots predominantly Black and Brown subjects, presenting them “in their most natural states.” He is concerned with creating images that tell a story, describing his work as a cross between documentary and conceptual photography, with a surreal aesthetic that is still meant to be rooted in reality.