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This article examines Bey v. City of New York - a recent Second Circuit case where four Black firefights suffering from Pseudofolliculitis Barbae (a skin condition causing irritation when shaving which mostly affects Black men) challenged the New York City Fire Department's Clean Shave Policy - with an intersectional approach utilizing legal theories of racial, disability, and religious discrimination.

The new perspective of the "Black Metropolis" implies that conditions created by the Great Migration helped blacks in northern cities to establish themselves in professional, entrepreneurial, and artistic, entertainment and mass media occupations. The present study evaluates this argument with Census data, focusing on the nation's largest black communities, Harlem (New York) and Bronzeville (Chicago), at time points that capture the first wave of the Great Migration. Contrary to expectations, the odds of black employment in the aforesaid occupations declined or remained essentially unchanged in both communities over the study period. Harlem and Bronzeville were surprisingly limited in their potential to offer opportunities for blacks to become professionals, entrepreneurs, and artists, entertainers and writers, perhaps because these communities were saturated by the tremendous influx from the South. Accordingly, it is recommended that the Black Metropolis perspective be modified, to provide a more accurate view of the consequences of the Great Migration.

Throughout the first three decades of the twentieth century, black people in New York City encountered white violence, especially police brutality in Manhattan. The black community used various strategies to curtail white mob violence and police brutality, one of which was self-defense. This article examines blacks’ response to violence, specifically the debate concerning police brutality and self-defense in Harlem during the 1920s. While historians have examined race riots, blacks’ everyday encounters with police violence in the North have received inadequate treatment. By approaching everyday violence and black responses—self-defense, legal redress, and journalists’ remonstrations—as a process of political development, this article argues that the systematic violence perpetrated by the police both mobilized and politicized blacks individually and collectively to defend their community, but also contributed to a community consciousness that established police brutality as a legitimate issue for black protest.

Oppression against Black women continues to be a significant problem in the United States. The purpose of this study is to use grounded theory to identify multiple dimensions of oppression experienced by impoverished Black women who use drugs by examining several settings in which participants experience oppression. Three case studies of drug using, impoverished Black women were randomly selected from two large scale consecutive ethnographic studies conducted in New York City from 1998 to 2005. Analysis revealed five dimensions of oppression occurring within eight distinct settings. While dimensions constitute different manifestations of oppression, settings represented areas within participants' lives or institutions with which participants interact. Dimensions of oppression included classism, sexism, familism, racism, and drugism. Settings included the school system, correction system, welfare system, housing and neighborhood, relationship with men, family, experiences with drug use, and employment. Findings have important implications for social justice, welfare, drug, and justice system policy.