race

For Walter Fleming, an enrolled member of the Kickapoo tribe in Kansas, Thanksgiving will be difficult this year because so many Native Americans have died from COVID-19.

"Particularly because it's been among our elders, the grieving is gonna be that much more," Fleming said. "These are the cultural guardians."

Fleming is a professor of Native American studies at Montana State University, who observes the holiday. He says it's a chance for people to come together, feast and celebrate.

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In the mid-1970s, more than 40 years before he won the Pulitzer Prize for music, pianist and composer Anthony Davis was driving with his wife to Boston for a concert when a police officer pulled them over .

When Joe Biden thanked Black voters in his first remarks as president-elect, he credited them with lifting his campaign from its lowest point during the Democratic primaries.

"You've always had my back, and I'll have yours," he promised.

While Biden won Black voters overwhelmingly across the country, they were key to his victories in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Georgia — places where President Trump and his allies have been targeting ballots in cities with large Black populations in an attempt to overturn the president's defeat and retain power.

Updated at 12:27 a.m. ET Tuesday

The Monday Night Football matchup between the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Los Angeles Rams made history, but it had nothing to do with the two teams vying for playoff seeding.

For the first time, the league assembled an all-Black officiating crew, led by Jerome Boger, a 17-year NFL official.

Rounding out the seven-member crew: umpire Barry Anderson, side judge Anthony Jeffries, line judge Carl Johnson, down judge Julian Mapp, field judge Dale Shaw and back judge Greg Steed.

Midshipman 1st Class Sydney Barber will become the first Black woman to serve as brigade commander at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md.

It's the top leadership post for midshipmen — in civilian terms, the equivalent of a student body president — and she is the 16th woman to serve in the position in the 44 years women have been allowed to attend the Naval Academy.

Poised to take over the role as leader of 4,400 midshipmen next semester, Barber told NPR's All Things Considered that there was a time when she had no desire to attend the Naval Academy.

Criminal charges for Kentucky state Rep. Attica Scott and more than a dozen others have been dropped. Scott was part of a group arrested in September during a demonstration against the grand jury decision not to directly charge Louisville police officers over the fatal shooting of Breonna Taylor.

Updated at 3:28 p.m. ET

A federal appeals court in Boston has ruled Harvard doesn't intentionally discriminate against Asian American applicants in its admissions process.

The panel of judges upheld a federal district court's decision from last year, teeing up a possible case in front of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Lucille Bridges, who in 1960 braved a gauntlet of threats and racist slurs to escort her daughter to a formerly all-white school in New Orleans in what became a symbol of opposition to segregation, has died at age 86.

Civil rights activist Ruby Bridges, who walked up the stairs of William Frantz Elementary School six decades ago to become its first Black student, announced her mother's death on Instagram late Tuesday. She included a photo showing mother and daughter holding hands as they exited the school, flanked by U.S. marshals.