Inequality in the Equality State: Race, Racism, and Identity

O, The Oprah Magazine has commissioned 26 billboards calling for the arrest of the police officers involved in the killing of Breonna Taylor to be placed across Louisville, Ky., the magazine said in a Friday article.

"Demand that the police involved in killing Breonna Taylor be arrested and charged," each of the 26 billboards — one for every year Taylor was alive — reads.

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The U.S. Census Bureau has announced it's ending the 2020 count a month early, a move that's likely to have a big impact on Indigenous communities in the West.

A Louisiana man will continue to spend his life in prison for stealing a pair of hedge clippers, after the state's Supreme Court denied his request to review a lower court's sentence.

Fair Wayne Bryant was convicted in 1997 of stealing the hedge clippers. Prosecutors pursued and won a life sentence in the case, a penalty permissible under the state's habitual offender law. Bryant appealed the life sentence as too severe.

Updated at 10:47 a.m. ET Thursday

A former Atlanta police officer, charged in the fatal shooting of a Black man in a Wendy's parking lot in June, has sued the city's mayor and interim police chief over his firing.

In the suit filed Tuesday against Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms and interim police Chief Rodney Bryant, former Officer Garrett Rolfe's attorneys claim that his use of deadly force against Rayshard Brooks had been justifiable.

Amnesty International says it has documented 125 separate instances of violence against protesters for racial justice in the U.S. over an 11-day period earlier this summer.

In a report published Tuesday, the human rights organization says that in the five years since 18-year-old Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, Mo., "there has been a disturbing lack of progress ... in ensuring that police officers use lethal force only when there is an imminent risk of death or serious injury to themselves or others."

In April 2018, Tianna Spears joined the State Department, looking forward to the promise of a fulfilling career. Then 26, she had spent three years learning Spanish in the Dominican Republic and Spain to help land a position in the Foreign Service.

"I was super-excited to start," she says. "I had dreams of being a diplomat and living in several places in Latin America."

The U.S. Navy says it is investigating footage that shows a man wearing a Colin Kaepernick jersey being attacked by dogs during a K-9 demonstration hosted by an independent Navy SEAL museum.

A viral video shows four dogs attacking a man wearing protective gear and a replica of former NFL star Kaepernick's red and white jersey. A second video shows the man in the jersey falling to the ground. He is heard making a joke about standing — an apparent reference to Kaepernick's protests while kneeling — eliciting laughter from a crowd of onlookers.

Standing on the banks of the Ohio River looking from Kentucky across to southern Indiana, poet and author Hannah Drake thinks about the enslaved people who stood here more than a century ago.

"What did they do when they weren't working tobacco fields or hemp fields? When they wanted to escape to Indiana, what were they dreaming about?" she wonders.

Kentucky claimed neutrality during the Civil War, but it was a slave state. Freedom lay on the other side of the river.

San Francisco Mayor London Breed plans to divert $120 million from law enforcement to efforts that address inequities faced by the city's Black community in housing, health, economic opportunity and education.

The proposal comes two months after, as Breed put it during Friday's announcement, "the murder of George Floyd shook this country to its core, in a way that I have never seen before," stoking ongoing protest against police brutality and racial injustice.

If you spend any time on social media, you know it can be a war of words out there. Whether it's the debate over wearing masks, the racial unrest sweeping across the U.S. or the impending presidential election — everyone's got an opinion and someone is always ready to give a hot take.

As protests over racial injustice in the U.S. continue, Major League Baseball is honoring an institution created 100 years ago because of its own racist past. The Negro Leagues showcased Black baseball players when they were banned from the big leagues.

MLB had to reschedule a celebration of the leagues' centennial originally set for June because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The number of Negro Leaguers left to celebrate is dwindling. The Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Mo., estimates there are about 100 players still living.

The arrival of federal agents in Portland three weeks ago to crack down on racial justice protests fueled tensions there, and helped push the city to the forefront of coverage of the nation's racial justice movement.

As one of the whitest big cities in the America, Portland's outsize role in the nationwide protests may strike some as surprising.

Updated at 6:23 p.m. ET

Former President Barack Obama called on Americans to honor the late civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis by working to expand voting rights — and if Congress has to abolish the filibuster to strengthen the Voting Rights Act, then so be it, Obama said.

As federal law enforcement agents descend onto cities in what the Trump administration describes as an effort to quell gun violence, Seattle's Democratic Mayor, Jenny Durkan, says it "looks like a dry run for martial law" that has the potential to suppress voting rights in the country.

Two controversies broke out this week regarding accusations of anti-Black racism in classical music. One involved two high-profile international soloists, pianist Yuja Wang and violinist Leonidas Kavakos. The other features less prominent individuals — a group of academics — but it also points to the slowness of the classical music community to take up difficult conversations about race and representation.

Protesters including members of Wall of Moms and Don't Shoot Portland are suing the Trump administration over what they describe as a violent and intimidating federal response to nightly demonstrations against systemic racism and police brutality.

Confrontations continued overnight Sunday between protesters and federal law enforcement in Portland, Ore., as hundreds gathered in the city's downtown for the 60th consecutive day of demonstrations following the Memorial Day killing of George Floyd. Tensions have continued to ratchet up due to the Trump administration's deployment of federal agents in the city.

Protests raged in several cities across the country Saturday night over police brutality and systemic racism. Thousands of protesters descended on Seattle and Portland, where police in both cities declared the gatherings had become riots, and made dozens of arrests. And in Austin, police said someone in a car shot and killed a protester.

Austin

Shortly before 10 p.m. Saturday in downtown Austin, as hundreds were walking down a street, many with their fists raised above them, a car turned toward the protesters.

The symbols of America's racist past have been under intense scrutiny since the protests against police brutality erupted nationwide. The confederate flag and other monuments from that era have been disappearing from public spaces — both by force and legislation.

A 900-pound bronze statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee has stood on the same spot at the Virginia state Capitol where the Confederate leader took command of the Army of Northern Virginia in 1861.

On Friday morning, that statue of Lee clad in a Confederate uniform was gone. So were the busts of seven other Confederates that had occupied places of honor in Virginia's Old House Chamber for decades, including those of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Confederate Gen. Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson.

The Republican-controlled Senate on Thursday overwhelmingly passed a defense appropriations bill that calls for renaming U.S. military bases that honor Confederate officers — a provision that President Trump has threatened to veto.

The Senate's 86-14 vote to approve the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is more than enough to override a veto, should the president follow through on his threat. The vote comes days after the House passed a similar version of the $741 billion bill.

A federal judge has temporarily blocked federal law enforcement officers deployed to Portland, Ore., from targeting journalists and legal observers at the protests against police violence and racial injustice that have intensified in recent days.