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NABJ Veteran Explains What Trump Was Saying To Black Journalists Between The Lines
Why did Trump show up, knowing he wasn’t walking into MAGA heaven? This Prized Journalist has an answer
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Why Black Condo Owners Have More Power Than They Think
Black condo owners are rare in America, but our economic power should give us greater leverage.
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Will Cherokee Freedmen Gain Tribal Rights?
Like other descendants of Cherokee Freedmen, ancestors who were once the tribe’s slaves, I am cheered that longtime Chief Chad Smith lost the recent election. Smith has crusaded against the treaty-guaranteed rights of freedmen descendants to be citizens of the Cherokee Nation, eligible to vote in tribal elections and receive any health, housing and other…
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Revising the Civil War Record
Though it has the movie Glory and an exquisite memorial on Boston Common, the Massachusetts 54th Regiment does not have Civil War history on its side. Glory, the 1989 movie starring Denzel Washington, and The Civil War, the Ken Burns series first aired on public television in 1990, portray the Massachusetts 54th as the Army’s…
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Maybe Your Great-Grandmother Really Was Cherokee
Black folks who always heard that grandma was an Indian—Cherokee, you say?—will get a sense of affirmation from a museum exhibit that just opened at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. Called “IndiVisible,” the exhibit was inspired by the Cherokees vote two years ago to exclude most members of African descent,…
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Teddy the Radical
Sen. Edward M. Kennedy is being lionized as an extraordinary legislator, a champion of civil rights, health care and education, and the caring patriarch of America’s royal family. He was all that. For African Americans, however, he was even more. Ted Kennedy was a white liberal who believed in black power, black political power, and…
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It’s the Teachers, Stupid
It has taken long enough, but the people responsible for setting the nation’s pace on education policy seem to have finally figured out what’s most important. We need better teachers and more of them to go around. President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan get it. And so does Michelle Rhee, D.C.’s chancellor of public…
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Slaves to Denial
I am a descendant of Cherokee Freedmen, the former slaves owned by the Cherokees and a smaller number of free blacks who lived among the tribe before the end of the Civil War. So watching the PBS series We Shall Remain, which aired last month, I empathized with Native Americans and silently condemned the white…
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Is Anything Black About the American West?
Reading obituaries about John Hope Franklin reminded me about a long-standing beef I have with a certain limited way of thinking about who African Americans are. For me, though, the telling biographical fact was where he was born—Oklahoma. In its obituary, the Raleigh News & Observer said the eminent historian “gave definition to the African-American…
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Pakistan’s Biggest Problem? It’s Not India
Things are pretty calm in India. Its recent election of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh means that the world’s largest democracy will once again be led by a seasoned economist. And it all happened peacefully, fairly and relatively without incident. By contrast, in Pakistan, the army is fighting to recapture territory from the Taliban and shore…
