Author

Jarvis DeBerry
Jarvis DeBerry, editor of the Louisiana Illuminator, spent 22 years at The Times-Picayune (and later NOLA.com) as a crime and courts reporter, an editorial writer, columnist and deputy opinions editor. He was on the team of Times-Picayune journalists awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service after that team’s coverage of Hurricane Katrina and the deadly flood that followed.
Column: What, to the Republican, is the nineteenth of June?
By: Jarvis DeBerry - June 19, 2021
The headline above pays homage to one of the most powerful and brilliant speeches in American history. Frederick Douglass, the 19th century’s most eloquent abolitionist, was asked to speak at an Independence Day celebration in Rochester, New York, on July 5, 1852, and he asked his White audience a most provocative question: “What, to the […]
Column: Nothing but racism explains Black women’s higher rate of horrible birth stories
By: Jarvis DeBerry - May 13, 2021
Tatyana Ali, who starred as Ashley Banks on “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” from 1990 to 1996, entered Harvard the next year where she double majored in government and African-American studies. In 2016, Ali and her husband, an English professor at Stanford, welcomed their first child, but only after mother and baby were roughly treated […]
Column: Republican praise of Martin Luther King sounds even more hollow and hypocritical now
By: Jarvis DeBerry - January 18, 2021
There’s a long list of Republicans who ought not part their lips this holiday to praise Martin Luther King Jr., to quote from his most famous speech or suggest in any way that they know anything about content of character. That list includes the 138 Republicans in the U.S. House and the six Republicans in […]