Politics

The national commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act takes place against the backdrop of a devastating full-scale assault on the civil rights movement’s signature legislation. For African Americans, the passage of the Voting Rights Act on Aug. 6, 1965, represented the culmination of a centuries-long struggle for citizenship. President Lyndon Johnson’s…

Tonight’s first Republican presidential debate for the 2016 election falls on the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act. Will the Grand Old Party’s candidates blow yet another shot to embrace one of the most popular laws of our time? Every four years we see a new media cycle about the Republican National Committee’s efforts to…

On a hot summer day last month in North Carolina, protesters gathered outside the federal courthouse in Winston-Salem to demand the right to vote for the state’s black citizens. Inside the courtroom, Carnell Brown recounted his own story of disenfranchisement: Brown—a retiree who spent decades sharecropping cotton—had attempted to cast an early ballot in the…

Lions? Yes. Humans? Not so much. Four Democrats in the U.S. Senate were lightning-quick to offer legislation to prevent what happened to Cecil the lion in Zimbabwe from happening again. Who says you need a powerful union or an army of lobbyists in politics to move an agenda? The next question is, will a bill for…

While speaking at the NAACP national convention earlier this month, President Barack Obama endorsed “banning the box” on job applications so that formerly incarcerated people, like me, have a fair chance at employment. That was a great gesture, but the federal government still hasn’t caught up with the 18 states, 100 cities and counties, and…

As we delve deeper into every minute of the infamous Sandra Bland traffic stop seen around the world, experts (as expected) are clawing into every legal nook and cranny to ask one of the most pressing questions of 2015: Exactly how many rights do you have should you see the popo’s red and blue lights…

President Barack Obama’s visit to his father’s homeland concluded Sunday with an address to nearly 5,000 young Kenyans in an indoor arena just outside Nairobi. There, he told the adoring crowd, “I am proud to be the first American president to come to Kenya, and of course, I’m the first Kenyan American to be president…

Tonight I begin my fourth visit to sub-Saharan Africa since taking office, the most of any U.S. president. I’ll also become the first sitting American president to visit Kenya, Ethiopia and the headquarters of the African Union. My visit to Kenya, where my father was born, obviously holds deep personal meaning for me, and my…

With 2016 on the horizon, presidential candidates are all on the new policy-wonk flavor of the year: “inequality.” And they’re using it in a heated bid to win as many white votes as they can get. Interestingly enough, the cognoscenti once talked up the canyon-sized gaps between rich and poor as default markers for a…

Being a politician is a tough job because unless you’re in a dictatorship, of royalty or Dr. Doom, you actually have to deal with dissent, disagreement and protests from the people you rule. Is it fun? Of course not, but just about every elected official in America, right or left, has to deal with it.…