When Pope Leo XIV emerged on the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica as the new head of the Catholic Church on Thursday, the Rev. Lawrence Ndlovu of Johannesburg could not help but wonder at the shade of his skin. “‘You’re not the classical white sort of person,’” Father Ndlovu said he had been thinking while…
This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times. In 1949, as the chef Lena Richard stirred steaming pots of okra gumbo and shrimp bisque on live TV in New Orleans, viewers across the city — mostly white housewives and the…
Long before Michael Jackson, the Rolling Stones and Rihanna, there was Freddie Colston. Colston was just a 20-year-old student from tiny Fairbanks, La., when he traveled to Los Angeles in January 1967. He had grown up in a home without indoor plumbing, but now he was staying in lavish accommodations with about 180 other members…
The Islamic State has lost thousands of fighters to death or prison and suffered the demise of its self-declared caliphate in Iraq and Syria. But the global reach of the group, also known as ISIS, is still vast, in part because of its sophisticated media output and the people around the world who consume it….