Word came last October that the federal government had earmarked more than half the required financing to hook up 10 homes on a Mississippi back road to the municipal water system in the city of Ruleville, six minutes away by car. As lead hell-raiser in the 7-year-old battle to get potable water piped to his…

If courtship in college is a kind of laboratory and apprenticeship for getting hitched somewhere down the road, senior psychology major Tiffany Mattaway knows of few who are making the grade. ”Hmmmm. Meaningful relationships? There aren’t that many on this campus. I know of exactly two,” says Philadelphia native Mattaway, set to graduate from Hampton…

Updated on June 6, 2010. More than two decades after the fact, William David Minor learned what Selma, Ala., prosecutors had concocted to eliminate him as a juror in the 1986 trial of a black man charged with murder. “They said my father was guilty of illegal activity, selling corn whiskey, and that my uncle…

The current standoff between William L. Pollard, the president of Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, N.Y., and a one-of-its-kind criminal justice think tank run on that campus by ex-prisoners with doctorates is emblematic of what researchers say is a widespread ambivalence over how to help the formerly incarcerated re-enter society. For almost six years Medgar…

Rates of reported child abuse are disproportionately high for black children, a fact that has long been linked to suspected racial bias by a largely white child-protection workforce. But a recently released study by Washington University researchers debunks that allegation, citing poverty as the main reason black children are twice as likely as white children…

Several years ago, Louisiana State University nixed an open-enrollment rule that had granted admission and ample financial aid to any applicant who was a state resident. Eliminating that rule was the prudent thing to do, given the tally of remedial students who entered the university but never got up to par academically, said Mary Alice…

During the holiday meals of B. Smith‘s western-Pennsylvania girlhood, the children of her extended clan learned some essential lessons: How to set a table. How to arrange flowers. Which dishes had been prepared by whom. How to chat with the one adult who invariably sat at the children’s table, signifying the next generation’s importance in…