Search results for: “node/Science”
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How Black Women Became Powerful
In 1992, President George H.W. Bush held a closed-door meeting at the White House to discuss law and order after the race riots in Los Angeles. Bush and the other lawmakers in attendance received an unexpected visitor in Rep. Maxine Waters, then a freshman representative from South Central Los Angeles, who had invited herself into…
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Book Excerpt: Before Brown v. Board of Education
Root and Branch: Charles Hamilton Houston, Thurgood Marshall and the Struggle to End Segregation, Rawn James Jr., 2010 In 1935, Thurgood Marshall and Charles Hamilton Houston’s fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha, had been working on plans to file a lawsuit to integrate the University of Maryland. Led by its assistant general counsel Belford V. Lawson Jr.,…
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Social Networks and Saddam Hussein: A Private Matter?
I have been thoroughly enjoying Chris Wilson’s five-part Slate series on how social networking, not hierarchical flow charts, helped the United States military capture Saddam Hussein in 2003: Russell’s files reveal why it was essential to think of the insurgency as a social network, not an organization. Power was decentralized. And since the primary motive…
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Green Is the New Black
The office of Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson lies halfway between Congress and the White House. The placement is appropriate; the 48-year-old New Orleans native—the first African American to run the agency tasked with protecting the air, water and health of Americans—walks a line between action and negotiation every day. She keeps a copy…
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Vancouver 2010: Soul on Ice
is an intern at The Root and senior journalism major at Howard University. USA Height: 6-foot-2 Weight: 185 lbs Event: Speed skating 500 meters, 1000m, 1500m 5000m, 10,000m The native Chicagoan may be the world’s fastest man on two skates. In 2006, he won the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics gold medal in the men’s…
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The Greensboro Four, 50 Years Later
The image of the Greensboro Four is frozen in American history, four young men sitting quietly at the lunch counter at the F.W. Woolworth in downtown Greensboro, N.C., on Feb. 1, 1960—politely asking to be served and being refused because they are black. There had been sit-ins before, but the headlines generated by the simple…
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Read/React: "Democrats, Get Down to Business"
Harold Ford Jr. wrote an op/ed for The New York Times in the wake of Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts. SCOTT BROWN’S victory last week in the Massachusetts Senate race, following the Republican gubernatorial triumphs in New Jersey and Virginia, marked the third time in three months that the Democratic Party has lost the support…
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The Art of Turning $25 Million Into $560 Million
How did a completely bankrupt satellite communications company—that now provides data and voice services to customers worldwide, including relief agencies in earthquake-torn Haiti—become a powerhouse with a market value of $560 million? Syncom Venture Partners came to its rescue, and set a better course. The easy part occurred when the Maryland venture capital firm, which…
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Software Prez Gets Posterized in NYC
What the heck are gigantic billboards of Oracle Corporation co-president Charles Phillips, and his “girlfriend,” YaVaughnie Wilkins, doing at 3rd Avenue and on Times Square in New York? The pro-athlete-outside-the-arena size posters have a link on them to the couple’s Web site. The site contains photo albums from 2001 through 2009, the couple singing Karaoke…
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The Root Interview: Charles Johnson
Charles Johnson walks into the Faire Gallery & Café on Seattle’s Capitol Hill, deceptively low-key for one of America’s pre-eminent men of letters. At the cozy café, owned by his daughter, Elisheba, Johnson asks for “my usual,” a large cup of coffee with two Splendas. It’s a good place from which to look at his…