The Harvard University basketball team hasn't been invited to participate in March Madness in 64 years. But in 2010, the university might make it to the NCAA basketball finals, thanks to its star and co-captain Jeremy Lin, a senior guard on the team.

Lin has been playing basketball since childhood, as his Taiwanese father and brothers loved playing the game. When Lin began to excel at the sport, however, he became the target of hateful race-based slurs. In a recent NPR interview, Lin said that, since junior high, he's been the focus of racist hecklers who make fun of his eyes, tell him to go back to China and characterize him as a food delivery boy.

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Today marks the 50th anniversary of the day when four black college students protested Jim Crow in Greensboro, N.C., by sitting at a lunch counter in Woolworth's and demanding to be served. While blacks could purchase household goods and other items from the department store in 1960, they could not sit at its then segregated lunch counters in the South.

The actions of the four students from North Carolina A&T State University --Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, David Richmond and Ezell Blair Jr.--led to a boycott of downtown Greensboro stores that lasted for months. Read more...

The All-American Basketball Alliance is different from other minor league basketball organizations. To be eligible to play in the league, one must be an American citizen with parents who are both white.

Don "Moose" Lewis, AABA commissioner, said the reasoning behind the league's roster restrictions is not racism, according to the Augusta Chronicle. Read more...

In 2004, Chinese-American rapper Jin Au-Yeung remarked in his single "Learn Chinese" that the American public would be learning the language of his elders. Turns out Jin wasn't lying. The New York Times reports that, while public schools have largely stopped teaching French and German language classes, Chinese classes, along with the mainstay Spanish courses, are booming.

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