culture

Ben S. Carson, a professor emeritus of neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins, writes at the Washington Times that although blacks have made tremendous strides since Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, the civil rights leader would be disheartened by the epidemic of “black-on-black violent crime” and the erosion of family values in the…

Nearly 50 years after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his call for justice from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, “tens of thousands reconvened near that spot Wednesday, under cloudy skies and amid hope and frustration about the current state of race relations in America,” the Washington Post reports. At 3 p.m.,…

(The Root) — For much of the last month, dozens of media outlets have told the story of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Martin Luther King Jr gave his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech. We know of the major organizers — Bayard Rustin, A. Philip Randolph and others —…

Timothy Hill, the brother of Michael Brandon Hill, who was armed when he entered a Georgia school last week, says President Barack Obama should be more focused on preventing such incidents rather than calling to thank the bookkeeper at the school who thwarted a potential mass shooting, according to Clutch magazine. Antoinette Tuff has likely been…

Aside from his lawyers’ fees, state law requires Florida to cover George Zimmerman’s legal costs because he was acquitted in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, the Orlando Sentinel reports. That includes the cost of expert witnesses, travel, depositions, photocopies, even that animated 3-D video that defense attorneys showed jurors during closing argument that depicts…

Controversial scholar Cornel West has taken aim at civil rights leaders again. This time he hits them for ignoring “Wall Street criminality,” saying that money has corrupted American culture, according to the Raw Story. At book launching event on August 24 following the 50th Anniversary March on Washington, West condemned mainstream civil rights leaders for…

This New York Post story about Joel Donaldson, a 21-year-old man who attempted to rob a woman for her cellphone in broad daylight in Brooklyn, N.Y., has two lessons.  Joel Donaldson, 21, allegedly punched his victim in the face before snatching her phone at around 2:30 p.m. at Court and Remsen streets, just steps from…

In New York City, city lawyers report a sharp decrease in the number of stop-and-frisk encounters in the second quarter of 2013, according to the New York Times. The numbers are the lowest they have been since Mayor Michael Bloomberg started implementing the program 11 years ago. From April through June, police officers conducted 58,088 involuntary…

(The Root) — It’s inevitable. Every January as we prepare to celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day, our Facebook and Twitter feeds become cluttered with obligatory links to King’s other famous quotes — gathered from various seminal texts, like the Letter From a Birmingham Jail and the Eulogy for the Martyred Children. (Jay Smooth gives…

(The Root) — In a March 2012 article for Baton Rouge, La.’s The Advocate, reporter Naomi Martin wrote, referring to me, “While some of his childhood friends still sell drugs on the streets of Baton Rouge, Toldson has a much different life as a professor at Howard University.” This statement confused me and made me…