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By John Payton
John Payton, President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., was invited to speak this week on the state of elementary and secondary education at the Centennial Conference of the National Urban League. He followed to the podium Arne Duncan, the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Education. Both were introduced by Marc Morial, the President and CEO of the Urban League.
Top 25 African-American Films of All Time
By Ralph Richardson
I am an NYC-based filmmaker, so I come to this Top 25 list with a wonderful joy and love for film, and since my mother took me to the movies every week since I was 3, I also have a pretty good knowledge of this grand art form
Sarah Rector: The Richest Colored Girl in the World
By Stacey Patton
“Oil Made Pickaninny Rich – Oklahoma Girl With $15,000 A Month Gets Many Proposals – Four White Men in Germany Want to Marry the Negro Child That They Might Share Her Fortune,” which appeared in The Kansas City Star on January 15, 1914, was just the first of many newspaper and magazine headlines during the next decade about Sarah Rector, the richest black child known to the world in that era.
My Top 10 African-American TV Shows of All Time
By Ralph Richardson
Hey ya’ll, I’m back, this time with the Top Ten African-American TV Shows of All Time.
Justice Denied: Still No Money for Black Farmers Settlement
By The Editors
Black farmers’ years of litigation and political lobbying to try to right an egregious wrong endured another frustrating setback Thursday when the Senate once again refused to appropriate the funds necessary to settle their long-decided discrimination lawsuit against the federal government.
Calvin Willis
Six years ago this week, Calvin Willis raised his arms high above his head and walked out of a Louisiana prison, free for the first time in 21 years. Willis was wrongfully convicted of rape in 1982 and served more than two decades before DNA testing excluded him as the perpetrator.
Chemical Relaxers: The Facts Might Not Be So Relaxing
By Janet Singleton
Chris Rock’s documentary Good Hair caused bad feelings last summer for many black female film-goers, who felt more betrayed than they did fairly portrayed by the film. Lost in all of the earsplitting debates and viral blog posts, was any deeper discussion of the health implications for black women and girls who use hair straightener
Detroit Diary: Detroit Red and the Untouchables
By Desiree Cooper
It’s interesting that while the black Civil Rights Movement looked to Gandhi as a model of social change, Dalits look to African-American militant movements.
Ishmael Reed on ‘Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media’
By Jill Nelson
Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media: The Return of the Nigger Breakers is Reed’s fourth book of media criticism. We talked to Reed while he was on the East Coast on a brief tour to promote a book whose publication and scathing critique of racist, corporate controlled media has largely and not surprisingly been ignored by those whom Reed labels the “Jim Crow Media.”
8 Year-Old Girl’s Hair Triggers Cries of Racism But Are We Jumping the Gun?
By Stacey Patton
When I finished the full story, I came to the surprising conclusion that this latest interaction between a white teacher and black child’s hair just might not be a racist incident after all.
Violence, Gun Rights, and Compassionate Progressivism
By Khalil Gibran Muhammad
In the coming weeks, as Chicago officials extend handgun rights to its citizens in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision, and politicians debate whether or not urban residents will be better protected by armed soldiers, important lessons from the past should not go unheeded.
The Myth of Our “Post-Racial Society”
By John Payton
I realize when I say we’re a very racially diverse democracy, sometimes I say it in a way that makes it sound like a triumph; in fact, it’s a challenge.
Whites Are The New Blacks: Shirley Sherrod and the Fable of White Victimization
By Lee A. Daniels
The racist fable that Andrew Breitbart and that loose clique of conservative confederates in the media tried to spin about Shirley Sherrod underscore a point historian Barbara W. Tuchman made years ago about the ethics of her profession.
“Leaving things out because they do not fit,” she wrote in her 1982 book, Practicing History: Selected Essays, “is writing fiction, not history.”
The Simkins Hall Controversy: Some Things Are Unforgivable
By Lee A. Daniels
A teachable moment on America’s racial past and present is occurring at the University of Texas at Austin because of the exposure of the dirty history of one of its early twentieth-century professors: his membership in the Ku Klux Klan.
‘A Small Act’: HBO Documentary Spotlights Dilemma of Education Funding
By Tarice L.S. Gray
The Hilde Back Educational Fund is a small organization, with the mission of promoting educational development through sponsorship. The film documents their small yet significant impact in Kenya. But the tiny village in Kenya can be looked at as a microcosm for much of the rest of the world.
New York City’s Wrong Stop-and-Frisk Policy
By Johanna Steinberg
Thousands of law-abiding New Yorkers are unfairly and unlawfully subjected to stops-and-frisks because New York City Police Department officers routinely make unfounded assumptions of criminality based on race or ethnicity
Justice Breyer on the Dred Scott Decision
In April Justice Stephen G. Breyer of the U.S. Supreme Court spoke at the New York Historical Society about the historical and present-day importance of the infamous Dred Scott decision, which played a critical role in bringing about the Civil War. We cannot think of a more fitting momemt to contemplate Justice Breyer’s words than on Memorial Day, which began in 1868 in the North as a day to pay homage to the Civil War dead.
No Birth Records = Tough Road Ahead When Aging Out of Foster Care
By Tarice L.S. Gray
Dominque Freeman is one of the lucky ones. She is just completing her freshman year at Cal State Northridge, and she’s doing so with the help of a full academic scholarship. Even more importantly, she now has an identity.
Just a year ago, Freeman didn’t exist.
Unlike most U.S. citizens, she had no birth certificate, no social security number, and she’d just aged out of a foster care system that had determined that her case was closed.
The Mortgage Crisis: Rich Defaulters are “Strategic;” Blacks and Low-Income People are Irresponsible
By Stacey Patton
Now, as the country braces for the possibility of a double-dip recession, additional spells of unemployment, and yet another wave of home foreclosures, a recent report by the New York Times found that the bulk of those dumping their mortgages are rich people.
They call it “strategic defaults.”
Ending Corporal Punishment Act An Important Step Since ‘Brown v. Board of Education’
By Stacey Patton
This past Wednesday, New York Congresswoman Carolyn McCarthy stood at the U.S. Capitol holding up a long wooden paddle as she introduced the “Ending Corporal Punishment in Schools Act” – a bill that would ban corporal punishment in all public and private schools that receive federal assistance.
The Trouble with Shirley: Race, Power and the Elephant in the Room
By Nicole Mason
The trouble with Shirley Sherrod is that she told the truth. In a small town speech before an even smaller NAACP chapter, she grappled publicly with the discomfort of what happens when power and decisions that can impact the lives of ordinary Americans are in the hands of individuals who have traditionally been shut off from power or not had access to resources.
Is This Racist?
Poll# 21A majority of the voters of Fremont, Nebraska have approved a new law – sure to be challenged in court – that bans undocumented Latino immigrants from jobs and rental housing there. Proponents of the law said the city of 25,000, which, according to census figures, has a small Latino population, was being inundated with “illegal immigrants” who were driving up the crime rates ans draining funds for city services. Fremont city officials urged voters to defeat the proposal, saying such a measure would likely be found unconstitutional, even as the cost of defending it would seriously harm the city’s finances. But the majority of voters ignored them.
Vote here!
Educate your sons and daughters, send them to school, and show them that beside the cartridge box, the ballot box, and the jury box, you have also the knowledge box.
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Feature, Uncategorized
Arizona Immigration Law: One Court Down; Two Courts to Go
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By Lee A. Daniels
A federal judge this week blocked the central and most controversial provisions of Arizona’s newly-enacted immigration law that took effect Thursday, declaring they improperly interfered with federal immigration enforcement law.
Feature, Uncategorized
Court Finds “Strong Inference” of Discrimination in Louisiana/HUD Post-Hurricane Recovery Program
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The funding formula used to provide grants to New Orleans residents whose homes were damaged or destroyed by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita very likely disadvantaged black homeowners because it was based on depressed property values that result from both current racial isolation and the city’s segregated past, a U.S. District Court judge has indicated.
Feature
Federal Oversight of New York State Juvenile Prisons: A New Start for Penal Reform?
By The Editors
State officials expressed hope that a new agreement giving oversight of four of New York’s most dangerous youth prisons will mark the start of significant reforms of the widely-condemned system.
Exoneree of the Week
Larry Johnson
Larry Johnson spent over 18 years in a Missouri prisons for a rape he did not commit. The victim described a clean-shaven African American male, but identified Johnson at a lineup, even though he had a mustache. He was convicted in 1984 based largely on the cross-racial identification. In more than half of wrongful convictions involving eyewitness misidentification, the eyewitness and defendant were of different races.
Johnson first contacted the Innocence Project in 1995, but it took six more years, and repeated motions, before a Missouri court allowed DNA testing on the remaining biological evidence. The results conclusively excluded Johnson as the perpetrator, and he was officially exonerated eight years ago this week.
For Blacks and Latinos: Access to the Wireless Web = Access to the Mainstream
By Lee A. Daniels
The so-called digital divide in possession and use of cell phones, laptops and other such devices – which once prompted anguished predictions that black Americans would be left behind on the information superhighway – is fast narrowing.
Old Wounds and New Pain: The Oscar Grant Tragedy
By Khalil Gibran Muhammad
In the wake of Oakland transit cop Johannes Mesherle’s recent involuntary manslaughter conviction for the on-duty shooting death of unarmed, 22 year-old Oscar Grant, the injury of his death and so many black men before him is as raw and bloody now as it was the day they were killed.
Slavery Alive and Well in the Gulf
By Stacey Patton
Since Louisiana has the highest rate of incarceration of any state in the country – of which 79 percent of its 39,000 inmates are black – it ’s no surprise to hear that BP is using prison labor to clean up the largest oil spill ever in U.S. history.
‘A Small Act’: HBO Documentary Spotlights Dilemma of Education Funding
By Tarice L.S. Gray
The Hilde Back Educational Fund is a small organization, with the mission of promoting educational development through sponsorship. The film documents their small yet significant impact in Kenya. But the tiny village in Kenya can be looked at as a microcosm for much of the rest of the world.
Senate Judiciary Committee Approves Kagan Nomination
By The Editors
Solicitor General Elena Kagan, President Obama’s second nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court, moved a step closer to confirmation Tuesday when the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to send her nomination to the full Senate.
Cartoon: July 30, 2010
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By Kevin Eason
Kevin Eason is a freelance editorial cartoonist and Illustrator from NJ. His brand of satire covers news events in politics, entertainment, sports and much more. Kevin’s work features include: TVOne, NABJ, WBLS_107.5FM, EURweb and various newspapers & magazines throughout the country.
The Trouble with Shirley: Race, Power and the Elephant in the Room
By Nicole Mason
The trouble with Shirley Sherrod is that she told the truth. In a small town speech before an even smaller NAACP chapter, she grappled publicly with the discomfort of what happens when power and decisions that can impact the lives of ordinary Americans are in the hands of individuals who have traditionally been shut off from power or not had access to resources.
Whites Are The New Blacks: Shirley Sherrod and the Fable of White Victimization
By Lee A. Daniels
The racist fable that Andrew Breitbart and that loose clique of conservative confederates in the media tried to spin about Shirley Sherrod underscore a point historian Barbara W. Tuchman made years ago about the ethics of her profession.
“Leaving things out because they do not fit,” she wrote in her 1982 book, Practicing History: Selected Essays, “is writing fiction, not history.”
Freedom Summer: The Savage Season that Made America a Democracy
By Bruce Watson
In the summer of 1964, the civil rights movement was stalled.
A decade had passed since the team of attorneys from NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund had won Brown v. Board of Education, yet much of the South was still defying the landmark decision. Bombs, police dogs, and fire hoses had repelled marchers from Birmingham to St. Augustine, Florida. Martin Luther King, Jr. was reaching new heights of eloquence but he could not be everywhere at once. Something startling was needed to revive the movement. That something was Freedom Summer.