Equity & Justice

The deaths of 27-year-old Carlos Ingram-Lopez in Tucson and 18-year old Andres Guardado in Los Angeles have reignited calls to not only end incidents of police brutality against Black people, but also those against Latinx people.

Lin-Manuel Miranda says he sees talk of radical change reflected not only in today's social and political moment but also in his musical Hamilton, which is based off of a political moment that took place 244 years ago.

"If there's any thesis about [Hamilton] it's everything that's past is present," Miranda tells NPR's Weekend Edition. "The contradictions that were present in the founding — the moment that those words 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness' were written and the ways in which we fall short of that — are still present."

While the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, in addition to thousands of protests, have sparked new conversations across the country, one thing that's remained for many families is "the talk."

Updated at 6:00 p.m. ET

Authorities in Louisville, Ky., have identified the victim in a fatal Saturday night shooting in a park where demonstrators gathered to protest the police killing of Breonna Taylor.

Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer said Sunday that 27-year-old Tyler Gerth died shortly after a shooter opened fire into a group of protesters in Jefferson Square Park.

Updated at 8:43 p.m. ET Sunday

Lawmakers in Mississippi voted to remove the Confederate battle emblem from the state flag on Sunday, clearing the way for Republican Gov. Tate Reeves to sign the measure into law.

The state House and Senate both approved legislation to remove the 126-year-old current flag and to form a commission to redesign it.

Dr. William Strudwick was finishing a shift at Washington, D.C.'s Howard University Hospital when his wife, Maria, texted. Their 19-year old son, Cole, wanted to join a protest five days after the killing of George Floyd.

It was 9 p.m. After dark, Strudwick weighed, he couldn't predict how protesters would act — or how police would treat his son. He wrote back one word to his wife: "No."

"When I came home, he was not there, and so I called him," Strudwick said. "And we had the conversation about him returning immediately."

Rowing crew got Arshay Cooper away from the gang life on Chicago's West Side in the 1990s.

In A Most Beautiful Thing: The True Story of America's First All-Black High School Rowing Team, he tells the story of how he, and others from rival neighborhoods, found their way to crew — and each other.

Now, Cooper is an accomplished chef in New York — and he works to convince other kids to find an outlet in crew. His forthcoming book has been turned into a documentary narrated by Common.

A little under a year ago, Eso Won Books, a Black-owned bookstore in Los Angeles, hosted Ibram X. Kendi for a signing. Eso Won sold about 40 copies of Kendi's newest book, How to Be an Antiracist, that night. In the months after, they sold very few.

But in these past few weeks? They've sold 500 copies — and counting.

The Minneapolis City Council on Friday unanimously approved a proposal to eliminate the city's police department, marking the first step toward establishing a new "holistic" approach to public safety.

The move follows more than a month of national outrage and protests against police brutality in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, a Black man who died after an officer pressed his knee into his neck for more than eight minutes.

When, on June 7, nine members of the Minneapolis City Council went onstage at a rally organized by Black activists and took turns reading a pledge to dismantle their city's police department, many in the crowd at Powderhorn Park let out not just cheers, but full-throated screams.

What does it take to reopen an investigation into a police-involved death of a young Black man after the district attorney refuses to press criminal charges and the officers have been cleared of any wrongdoing?

Splash Mountain, a Disney Theme Park staple ride, is undergoing a design change in response to complaints about its association with the film Song of the South. Disney announced in a statement on Thursday that the ride would be "re-themed" to focus on the 2009 animated film The Princess and the Frog.