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The struggle to achieve equality for African-Americans wasn’t over with the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Polling taxes, grandfather clauses, and outright intimidation were some of the tactics used for the next hundred years to restrict voting rights for people of color. “Separate but equal” was the slogan and driving force behind the segregationist movement. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, considerable momentum began to build around the idea that segregation was as harmful as voter suppression. Journalism, and TV, to be more precise, was the catalyst for that change in public opinion.  Brown vs Board of Education was a landmark Supreme Court case in which the Court declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students to be unconstitutional. “Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal”, the Court ruled. In the summer of 1957, African-American leaders in Little Rock tested the Supreme Court decision by enrolling nine black s...

The New Yorker is a magazine that revolver around the publication of essays, fiction, criticism, cultural commentary, and reportage. It’s often focused on New York’s culture and social events and has a clear editorial line that leans progressive, as most publications in the region. Unlike any other publication I have ever seen, The New Yorker lists it’s writers, contributors, critics, and cartoonists right on the first page, but it doesn’t print it’s masthead anywhere in the magazine. If you do a little digging, you will find out that David Remnick has been the editor since 1998, but there is no masthead listing the editors and staff. It appears to be a tradition rooted in the magazine’s founder and first editor in chief’s idea that “...in the early days of the magazine..., first, there were no proven editors; second, I was encouraging people to write for a magazine that used pseudonyms and initials, signed pieces at the bottom, and didn’t play up writers in any way; and, third, be...

Melissa Noel is an award-winning freelance journalist. She has worked for NBCNews.com, Huffington Post, Caribbean Beat Magazine and Voices of New York and the recipient of a Pulitzer Center grant to report on Caribbean children left behind by their parents when they migrate to another country.  On November 28th, she stopped by LaGuardia to talk about her reporting, the challenges she faced, the opportunities she found, and the children at the center of these stories. Being the daughter of Caribbean parents, from Guyana, to be more specific, it was only natural that this subject didn’t seem foreign to her. In early 2016 Noel attended a Caribbean Film Academy screening in Brooklyn of the short film “Auntie” by Barbadian filmmaker and Barrel Stories Project founder Lisa Harewood. Both the fictional film and the documentary project highlight some of the very real ways migration and separation impact Caribbean families. After the screening, she met Melissa Elias, originally from Tri...