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Spencer's Beauty-Shop Pitch for Obama
(The Root) — It’s not every day that an Oscar-winning actress stops by the neighborhood beauty salon and barbershop to compliment your roller set. But on Saturday’s national day of grassroots action for the Obama campaign, Octavia Spencer of The Help brought Hollywood celebrity to North Carolina to boost the president’s re-election chances, vote by…
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Smiley on Black People's 'Backstory'
(The Root) — With “America I Am: The African American Imprint” making its home in Charlotte, N.C., while 35,000 visitors descend on the city for the Democratic National Convention in September, Tavis Smiley is sending a message. “It’s important for Americans to understand that there is a 400- to 500-year backstory to Barack Obama,” the…
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Alfre Woodard on Activism and Actors
(The Root) — When actress Alfre Woodard recently traveled to Charlotte, N.C., to announce a cybersummit at Johnson C. Smith University that will coincide with the Democratic National Convention in September, it was just another step in a lifetime of political activism. “I started walking the precincts with my parents when I was 10 years…
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Alfre Woodard Q&A
Mary C. Curtis is a Roll Call columnist and contributor to NPR and NBCBLK. She has worked at the New York Times, the Baltimore Sun, the Charlotte Observer and Politics Daily and as a contributor to the Washington Post. She is a senior facilitator for the OpEd Project at Cornell and Yale universities. Follow her…
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Mrs. YoMama Controversy: Not Again
One thing I hate to do is act as teacher to the clueless. But it’s clear, after the speaker of the Kansas House, Republican Mike O’Neal, forwarded an email with pictures making fun of first lady Michelle Obama’s appearance and calling her “Mrs. YoMama,” that school is once again in session. You would think these…
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Take Politics Off the Playground
“Timmy” Kaine? Really? Up until then, the conference-call conversation had been politics as usual. It was rough, for sure, but about what you’d expect. In their preview of President Obama’s bus tour through Southern swing states, you didn’t expect Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, North Carolina GOP Chair Robin Hayes and his Virginia counterpart…
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Rep. Clyburn: Obama Will Win Re-Election
Rep. James Clyburn has seen a lot change in his 71 years — in his native South Carolina and the country. The son of “an activist fundamentalist minister and an independent civic-minded beautician,” as he describes them in his official bio, is the assistant Democratic leader in the 112th Congress and No. 3 Democrat in…
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Politics and Progress in the New South
Charlotte, N.C., Mayor Anthony Foxx’s 15th-floor office looks out onto a busy New South city that will get even busier in September 2012. Once the Democratic National Convention moves in for a week — bringing along President Barack Obama and 35,000 delegates, politicians, celebrities and members of the media — Foxx might be sharing only…
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Little Common Ground at Panel on 'The Help'
When I was growing up in Baltimore in the 1960s, when my oldest brother was in law school, my mother occasionally performed day work — that is, she would hire herself out for the day to clean a house from top to bottom. She was a stay-at-home mom with a high school degree and some…
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Why We're Moving Back South
Thomas Clark was one of those committed New Yorkers. “For me it was the whole urban dynamic of being in a big city, being in the financial center of the world,” said the former New York state banking official and onetime president and CEO of Carver Federal Savings Bank. Commuting into Manhattan from his White…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
