Janell Ross

Time Magazine — With three men convicted in Ahmaud Arbery's killing, the importance of local papers in exposing such stories is clear-even as their future is in jeopardy

Time Magazine — It doesn't require much of a breeze. But when the wind blows just the right way across the woodsy riverside land that sits between the East and Brunswick Rivers, straddling Georgia Highway 17, the American flag at the entrance to Satilla Shores extends to a state of full attention.

Time Magazine — Why Black Bitcoiners seem certain that crypto represents keys to a car bound for somewhere better.

Time Magazine — So much of what is ugly and unhinged about America can be seen in the eyes of a mother whose 8-year-old is dead. But, on a Tuesday in August, at Atlanta's downtown courthouse, that's where Fulton County, Ga.'s district attorney, Fani Willis, is looking.

Time Magazine — Texas Democrats faced criticism for fleeing to Washington, D.C. But these lawmakers see their gamble as a deeply personal battle for the future of their state

Time Magazine — Ben Crump is on the phone. No. Ben Crump, 51, is on the phone-while also reading email, looking at texts and intermittently contributing to a hushed conversation happening in the room above the sanctuary at Minneapolis' Greater Friendship Missionary Baptist Church.

Time Magazine — There are sounds that humans make with intention. Then there are the wordless sounds we make when our emotions take over-the sounds that, in their texture and tone, speak even more clearly.

Time Magazine — By Tuesday morning, almost everything in Minneapolis was boarded up, as citizens waited for the verdict in the Derek Chauvin trial.

Time Magazine — Like a lot of us, Alfonzo "Box" Williams, 44, saw the footage-the last moments of George Floyd 's life, at 38th Street and Chicago Avenue-online, the day after Floyd died. A giant teddy bear of a man, Box was shaken. To him, the way Floyd died seemed ice cold, just insane.

Time Magazine — Texas threatened to slash Dallas County's vaccine doses if it prioritized vaccines for the mostly Black and Latino people in medically vulnerable zip codes

NBC News — ATLANTA - In the way that one could on election night 2020, LaTosha Brown was making the rounds. She was in a suite near the top of a luxury hotel so close to the airport that the balcony view overlooked a Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport airplane parking lot.

NBC News — In the late 1990s, Stacey Abrams faced a decision. Abrams was working on a master's in public policy at the University of Texas-Austin, gleaning all that she could learn from Rep. Barbara Jordan of Texas, the first Black woman elected to Congress by a former Confederate state.

NBC News — Ebony Jones thought she was one of the lucky ones. Jones, a Black woman in her 30s, inherited a home her grandfather, a World War II veteran, had bought nearly seven decades earlier with the help of his GI Bill benefits.

NBC News — In August 1965, law school student Mitch McConnell was in his 20s and a veteran of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where he heard Martin Luther King Jr. deliver the "I Have a Dream" speech. McConnell dropped by the office of a popular and respected Republican senator from his home state, Kentucky, John Sherman Cooper, to say hello.

NBC News — Mitch Landrieu catapulted from progressive philanthropy darling to household name when he ordered the removal of four Confederate monuments in New Orleans while serving as mayor in 2017. Now, he's organizing public conversations about race and opportunity while creating a program to help produce elected officials willing to prod their communities toward equity.

NBC News — MINNEAPOLIS - By Tuesday afternoon, the intersection of 38th Avenue and East Chicago Avenue where George Floyd died had become a kind of shrine. People - black and white - trying to express something, trying to see something, perhaps trying to wrestle with their feelings.

NBC News — As states and cities across the country have modified social distancing orders into a patchwork of recommendations and requirements, many are paying increased attention to how and where social distancing orders are being enforced. And some experts say a pattern, based on anecdotes and available data, is emerging showing that different standards are being applied for different groups. The homeless, people in low-income neighborhoods and people of color wherever they congregate face disproportionate enforcement of social distancing rules, which sometimes ends in arrest, armed police response in crisis uniform and physical takedowns, according to experts. What limited data can be gleaned from the nation’s five largest cities — New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and Phoenix — begins to outline a picture of uneven enforcement.

NBC News — Self-defense — one of the legal options open to the men charged with murder in connection with Arbery's killing — can feel like a common-sense standard, discernible by Americans who believe they know the law and how it functions. But, the Arbery case and the way it has been handled, experts say, is an example of the way that concepts such as danger and fear, even who is the aggressor and who has a right to self-defense, are often manipulated or blurred in real life by race. In fact, what happened on that Brunswick street was not totally unheard of, but part of a documented 21st century pattern. When white Americans who live in a "stand your ground" state make self-defense claims in situations involving a black person's death, 36 percent are ruled justifiable homicides...

NBC News — The irony is that the misinformation amplified by Diamond and Silk and others has gained traction in conservative, mostly white social media spaces and black, mostly left-leaning online spaces, too. Concepts similar enough to pass as first cousins on the misinformation family tree have proliferated in social media spaces that do not usually cross or blend. One example: false conspiracy theories related to the tech billionaire Bill Gates' health care philanthropy. In conservative white spaces, there are unsubstantiated claims that the coronavirus is Gates' route to disease profit, a crafty government surveillance system or a man-made population-control mechanism with unfair economic consequences. When those fictional claims moved to conservative black Twitter, misinformation cast the virus as a black population reduction device, a useful if unplanned excuse for aggressive and unfair government monitoring or a poverty boosting tool. Once the misinformation circulated among left-leaning black social media, it often described the coronavirus and the resulting disproportionate death toll as racial population shaping. In those circles, social distancing measures were also sometimes described as a green light for abusive policing.

NBC News — The day President Donald Trump went to the National Institutes of Health for an update on progress toward a vaccine for COVID-19, many of those who sat behind the presidential seal with him were white men well known in the worlds of science, medicine and, now, national anxiety control: vaccine and infectious disease specialists like Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. John Mascola, Dr. Barney Graham and the man who led the human genome project, Dr. Francis Collins, director of the NIH. Just 122 people had tested positive for the coronavirus in the U.S. Reporters stationed around the edges of the room asked the president about virus-related travel bans and his Super Tuesday predictions. No one asked Corbett — whom Collins had just described as a "wonderfully talented young scientist in our midst," as well as the only woman and black person at the table — a single thing. Just 13 days later, Corbett's team began first-stage clinical trials of a COVID-19 vaccine, the first of its kind in the world and the fastest progress ever toward a possible vaccine for a novel pathogen.

NBC News — Variations on the immunity myth — claims that black worshipers can't be infected at church where a pastor refused to cancel in-person services and false assertions that there are zero COVID-19 infections in Africa to name a few — remain on the internet along with other fantastical ideas. The myth of group immunity may, public health, disease control and bioethicists say, provide some people with a bit of levity or sense of control in a seemingly dire time. But the risk of false information circulating in any form far outweighs the value of a few chuckles or nerve-calming denial. What's more, fictional claims about black immunity from a potentially deadly viral infection are connected with a long history of contradictory but uniformly racist ideas serving the social or political needs of the moment, experts say.

NBC News — Black Americans donated nearly $41 million last year to Democratic presidential candidates, with Bernie Sanders topping the list, according to a new report. The total amount donated was nearly 13 percent of what all candidates collected through an online donor platform handling most donations made to Democrats.

NBC News — In the days since the field broke sharply for Biden, supporters of other candidates have expressed disbelief at best — derision and racist disdain at worst — for the black voters responsible for his recent successes. But for many black voters, Biden was the best-known option — the candidate with the right experience who could appeal to the widest cross-section of Democrats. He was, to others, President Barack Obama's forever vice president, a man who could take on President Donald Trump in what could be a bare-knuckles battle for the White House.

NBC News — CHARLESTON, S.C. - Jennifer Clyburn Reed, the middle daughter of House Majority Whip James Clyburn, has become a one-woman welcoming committee for ambitious Democrats in South Carolina. She visited a historic marketplace with Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and small businesses owned by black women with Sen. Kamala Harris, set up informal meet-and-greets with voters and attended campaign events for each of the 12 different Democratic presidential candidates when they visited the state. Three campaigns asked outright for her endorsement. Clyburn Reed’s father, after all, is the senior ranking black American in Congress. James Clyburn, a Democrat who became a member of the House in 1993, has endorsed three presidential candidates since that time: John Kerry in 2004, Hillary Clinton in 2016 and, now, Joe Biden. The potential influence he and his family wield in South Carolina is apparent to anyone in the state with a television set. Clyburn Reed’s son Walter Clyburn Reed has appeared in a Pete Buttigieg campaign ad, where Clyburn Reed describes his grandfather as his hero.