In February 2018, the APD SWAT officers were called to the scene of a shooting near Red River and 12th. The officers deployed a stun gun on 31-year-old Quentin Perkins who, according to their reports, was trying to get away. However, a different officer's body-worn-camera footage showed Perkins was on the ground. Read more here.

An Austin City Council affordable housing initiative fizzled out early June 19 as the Council voted to adopt a PUD ordnance supported by the developer lobby and opposed by city boards, city commissions, and housing advocates. The ordinance will contribute little to solving Austin’s affordable housing crisis. Read more here to understand how East Austin was apprehended.

Nelson Linder has been the president of the Austin chapter of the NAACP for 19 years, so he's had his fair share of seeing justice and injustice. He says when he first heard that actor Jussie Smollett was attacked, he was angry. And now that it's turned out to be far from the truth, he's disappointed. Read more here.

Eight short years. That’s how long it took Jean-Michel Basquiat to secure his legacy as an art world prodigy.


He died at the age of 27 from a heroin overdose, leaving behind paintings, drawings, and notebooks, many of which explored themes of counterculture American punk, the urban plight of the African diaspora, improvisational jazz music and the vagaries of fame during the Ronald Reagan-era 1980s.


As influential as Basquiat is, most of his work is privately owned and very few public galleries or museums own or exhibit any of his best-known pieces. His paintings very rarely appear at auction and now attract stratospheric prices when they do. In May 2016, Basquiat’s 1982 Untitled painting shattered his auction world record when it was sold for $57.3 million at Christie’s, making him the most financially successful African-American painter in history. Basquiat fanboy (and collector) Jay Z even bragged in his 2013 song Picasso Baby — "It ain’t hard to tell, I’m the new Jean-Michel. Without him, graffiti as an art form would not exist in the way it does today."

Born in 1875 in New Canton, Virginia, Carter G. Woodson was the second African American to receive a doctorate from Harvard, after W.E.B. Du Bois. Known as the "Father of Black History," Woodson dedicated his career to the field of African-American history and lobbied extensively to establish Black History Month as a nationwide institution. He also wrote many historical works, including the 1933 book The Mis-Education of the Negro. He died in Washington, D.C., in 1950.


With its focus on the Western indoctrination system and African-American self-empowerment, Mis-Education has become required reading at numerous colleges and universities.


Woodson lobbied schools and organizations to participate in a special program to encourage the study of African-American history, which began in February 1926 with Negro History Week. The program was later expanded and renamed Black History Month. (Woodson had chosen February for the initial week-long celebration to honor the birth months of abolitionist Frederick Douglass and President Abraham Lincoln.)