Black people are growing lonelier as we age, and capitalism is the reason. In the first essay of the Defender’s Black Liberation Theology series, Minister Andrew Hairston, Baptist minister and co-chair of Austin DSA, writes about the family he lost in court, the Black socialist ministers who came before him, and why grief belongs in the pews and the organizing meeting rather than alone at home.

“Trying to find a Black kid at night, that’s always fun,” one of the two officers on the recording can be heard saying on body camera in the minutes before Lafayette County Deputy Kenneth Lewie shot nineteen-year-old Saveion McConnell to death on the shoulder of U.S. 50. The Kansas City Defender has obtained the footage, and the prosecutor’s memo that cleared Lewie. Neither says what the state has been telling the public.

Born from organizer Tiffany Watts’ own search for community, the three-day festival centers connection, creativity, accessibility and Black Sapphic visibility.

Four and a half months after a Lafayette County deputy rammed nineteen-year-old Saveion McConnell with a patrol car and then fired nine rounds at him on the shoulder of U.S. Highway 50, Johnson County Prosecutor Robert Russell announced Tuesday that no crime was committed. Saveion had no weapon. Witnesses say his hands were in the air.

Artificial intelligence needs more power than America will give it, so the industry went looking for ground where nobody gets a vote. In Parsons, Kansas, where one in five residents lives in poverty, that means the first nuclear reactor in history designed to operate underground, drilled through the aquifer, on land where the Army still detonates waste explosives under federal permit.

She spent time on the CIA payroll and a lifetime near power. Gloria Steinem died wealthy, surrounded by family and friends, lionized in the New York Times. Assata died in exile. Black and Brown feminists ask whose liberation the icon’s bourgeois politics served.

A secret contract. No policy protecting riders’ data. The Defender obtained the deal KCATA signed to harvest bus riders’ faces for AI.