Politics
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‘This Is Our Selma’: NC’s Fight for Voting Rights
Monday marks the start of a pivotal voting-rights trial in North Carolina. On the line? Access to the ballot box for tens of thousands of African-American voters. Calling the trial its “Selma,” referencing the Selma-to-Montgomery marches of 1964 in Alabama, the North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP is taking Gov. Pat McCrory to court…
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Police Misconduct and More Killings Go Largely Ignored
While the nation is wrangling over the fate of a Confederate flag still flapping, high-and-mighty, outside South Carolina’s Statehouse, no one seems to have noticed that July is barely into its first full week, and already 26 people across the nation have been killed by police. That’s according to The Guardian’s authoritative “The Counted” project. While the…
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Take Down That Flag, Mayor of Columbia, SC, Demands
I was just a boy in school the first time I read the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter From Birmingham Jail, trying to imagine what it must have been like to live through those events and be part of a movement that fundamentally redefined who we are as a nation and a people. I…
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When It Comes to Race, Valerie Jarrett Asks Why It’s All on the President. But Why Not?
On Wednesday, President Barack Obama’s top adviser Valerie Jarrett did a 30-minute interview with Walter Isaacson at the Aspen Institute. Isaacson asked Jarrett about Obama’s reticence on race. “Some of us feel there was an opportunity throughout this presidency to really deal passionately, vocally and without putting a muffled hand in front of the face on…
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A Black Pastor Reveals How He Came to Support Same-Sex Marriage
My journey toward being an unapologetic supporter of marriage equality for gay and lesbian couples began in the fall of 2011 when I requested a meeting with a lesbian couple who had joined our church. I noticed they had joined on separate Sundays so as to appear not to be together, and I wanted to…
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A Forceful Obama Decries Racism and White Supremacy in Eulogy
President Barack Obama tapped into the black church’s soaring rhetorical traditions Friday afternoon to deliver a bold and brilliant eulogy honoring the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, the 41-year-old preacher and state senator who was gunned down, along with eight others, at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C. Grace proved to be the theme running…
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The Confederate Flag Flap Is a Distraction From Tough Issues of Racism
Momentum is building fast as an almost unstoppable wave of outrage calls for the removal of state-sanctioned Confederate flags. The fact that treasonous rebel flags are still flying strong atop or next to government buildings 150 years after the Civil War itself is as surreal as it is, frankly, believable. The rebel jack has always…
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Meet the (White) Press: Racism in ‘Progressive’ Media Spaces
If more evidence were needed of how black bodies are pawns in political chess, look no further than Sunday’s episode of Meet the Press. Just days after nine African Americans were murdered inside Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., in what many agree was an act of anti-black terrorism, Chuck Todd and his producers decided…
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Congressman: Those Using Tragedy to Take Down Confederate Flag Are ‘Beyond Contempt’
On a day when many Republicans and Democrats in South Carolina found common ground in agreeing that the Confederate flag adjacent to the Statehouse should be removed from its perch and placed in a museum, a congressman from Alabama had a different view. Speaking to radio host Matt Murphy on Monday, Rep. Gary Palmer (R-Ala.)…
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SC’s Gov. Nikki Haley and Other Republicans Come Out Against Confederate Flag
South Carolina’s Republican Gov. Nikki Haley and the state’s two Republican senators, Tim Scott and Lindsey Graham, along with Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, gathered at a press conference to announce their desire to remove the Confederate flag from the South Carolina Statehouse grounds. Momentum has been building against the Confederate flag since nine…