race

The lead attorney for the city of Chicago resigned Sunday amid continuing fallout from a botched and mistaken police raid nearly a year ago at the home of a Black woman.

Attorney Mark Flessner said in a concise email to staff that he had resigned as Corporation Counsel for the city of Chicago. He said simply that he would work on a transition plan in the next few days.

Members of a prestigious research unit at Google have sent a letter to the company's chief executive demanding that ousted artificial intelligence researcher Timnit Gebru be reinstated.

Gebru, who studies the ethics of AI and was one of the few Black research scientists at Google, says she was unexpectedly fired after a dispute over an academic paper and months of speaking out about the need for more women and people of color at the tech giant.

Major League Baseball has for years acknowledged the contributions and the legacy of the thousands of Black athletes who played in the Negro Leagues.

On Wednesday, the league went a step further, saying it was officially "correcting a longtime oversight in the game's history" and recognizing those professionals as Major League-caliber players. The league said it will also include their statistics and records as part of MLB history.

In 1966, Charley Pride's debut country single, "The Snakes Crawl at Night," was deliberately mailed out to radio stations without a photo of him. That way, his label strategized, his voice alone would inform the industry's first impression before Pride's African American identity was widely known. On the one hand, this oft-repeated tale underscores the blatant racism of the 1960s country music business and, on the other, the belief that his singing could nonetheless sell itself.

When Virginia Hedrick first heard about the coronavirus circulating on cruise ships off the coast of California back in March, it made her think back to some of the first ships of European settlers that arrived on American shores centuries ago, also teeming with disease.

It's been said over and over and over again: 2020 has been a year like no other. So, as a team, we decided to look back at the episodes we've worked on over the past year and reflect on what they've meant to each of us. We remain in awe of just how much has happened — how many stories we were able to cover, and how many we're still itching to tell. We have a boatload of fascinating episodes in the works — so stay tuned. But before we venture into the uncharted waters of the new year, we want to share with you some of our favorite episodes from the past 12 months.

Updated at 5:53 p.m. ET

Editor's note: This is a story about the pervasive nature of racial insensitivity in America and how it persists to this day, and contains terms some might find offensive.