How close are we to ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment? The question hangs anew over Congress. And the courts. Erica Benson, the campaign coordinator for Project 28 MO, a Kansas City-area organization working for ERA ratification, moderates a panel of officials, experts, and ERA activists as they assess the decades-long effort to enact what would be the 28th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, enshrining the principle of gender equality in our founding charter.

One hundred years ago this month, women won their fight for the right to vote – though not all of them. Black women, who had pleaded as passionately for suffrage as they did for African Americans’ civil rights, welcomed the 1920 passage and ratification of the 19^th Amendment as only a partial victory. Many Native and Asian Americans and other women of color were not granted citizenship and likewise kept at arm’s length from voting booths. University of Minnesota historian Sarah-Jane (Saje) Mathieu recalls and examines those revealing silences amid the celebration of the landmark constitutional amendment.

A lot of Black kids, Gabriel Bump says, are just trying to live their lives – fall in love, go to school, not do their homework – but find it difficult to move problem-free through today’s America. Growing up on Chicago’s South Shore, he was one of them. Claude McKay Love, the protagonist of Bump’s debut novel, is, too. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the pervasive and pernicious impact that the digital divide – the economic, educational, and social inequity between those who have computers and online access and those who do not – is having on Black Americans and other disadvantaged populations in Kansas City and across the country.