Blacks

Seven Los Angeles buildings that experts say have played significant roles in the lives of local African Americans have been placed on the National Register of Historic Places, authorities have announced. The listing follows a yearlong study of some 4,000 parcels in South Los Angeles by consultants hired by the city's Community Redevelopment Agency.

To those who know it only by reputation, the Nickerson Gardens housing project in Watts is a forbidding place, plagued by violence and poverty and ruled by African American gangs. So naturally, Father Peter Banks brought 200 Latino parishioners there in December for a posada, a Christmas ritual that re-creates Joseph and Mary's search for a place for Jesus to be born. Banks, pastor of St.

After Cheryl Green, a black teenager, was gunned down, allegedly by Latino gang members, near her house after school, her mother was approached by several African Americans offering to retaliate violently for her daughter's death. Earlier this week, Charlene Lovett recalled the moment, looking back on how tense relations between blacks and Latinos had become in the section of Harbor Gateway known as "The Strip."

One of Michael Jackson's most famous lyrics proclaims, "It don't matter if you're black or white." But when it comes to the late singer's identification with African Americans, that declaration becomes much cloudier.

It was the height of the Harlem Renaissance, the 1920s in New York City. The couple had found a beautiful apartment, filled with Art Deco trappings, right down to the frosted swans etched into the shower door. You've worked so hard all day, Roy told Maddie: Why don't you just take a shower and I'll make us some dinner? Then, as she stood beneath the pulsing spray, Maddie saw him in his bathrobe, through the frosted swans.

The memo emerged early this week on an African American news website, then spread via e-mail, finally landing on the front page of the local paper. Its message: Atlanta is a majority-black city whose 35-year string of black mayors "has represented the breakthrough for black political empowerment in the South." And therefore, the white candidate running for mayor this year must be defeated. Reportedly disseminated by a local group called the Black Leadership Forum, it was the kind of idea guaranteed to raise hackles in Atlanta, a city that has worked hard to live up to native son Martin Luther King Jr.'s dictum about judging by character rather than skin color.

The 19th century laborers pooled their money to build the biscuit box of a church along Offutt Road in the southwest corner of Baltimore County. Atop a stone foundation they put four walls, eight windows, a peaked roof, three rows of pews, a pulpit for inspiration and a wood stove for warmth -- and called the thing done. It can hardly have been much to look at when it was completed in 1887, and it surely isn't now. But that could change if the Friends of the Cherry Hill African Union Methodist Protestant Church make good on their plans to turn it into a museum dedicated to local black history.

Hair is nothing if not a powerful subject for African Americans. In Chris Rock's new documentary "Good Hair," which opened Friday, he sets out to explore the complexities of living with black hair. He visits beauty salons, hairstyling competitions, science labs and Indian temples. He interviews a cavalcade of celebrities, salon owners and their clients in multiple cities. Through the ages, people of all ethnicities have obsessed about hair. Ancient Romans, Assyrians, Greeks and Egyptians wore wigs; so did Marie Antoinette and Thomas Jefferson.

Very few African Americans have used Los Angeles County's free H1N1 vaccine clinics, public health officials told county leaders Tuesday, raising concerns about outreach to a community that, as a group, has a high risk for serious flu complications. Dr. Jonathan E. Fielding, the county's public health director, expressed disappointment in the turnout by blacks but said he did not think the problem was a lack of clinic sites. "Some surveys suggest it's lack of willingness to come forward," Fielding said, "and some of that is historic."

When is a black woman simply a black woman? It's a question that feels so reflexive with an answer so self-evident, it shouldn't be a question at all. Black women are who they are, nothing more or less. They are the sum of their qualities, which often include being plain-spoken, no-nonsense, emotionally transparent and as enduring as necessary. They also tend to be physically audacious, comfortable in their own skin and, even in the most oppressive circumstances, in control. Think Rosa Parks, Oprah Winfrey, Harriet Tubman, Beyonce, Michelle Obama.