Politics

President Obama announced his re-election campaign last month, but first lady Michelle Obama didn’t officially join the 2012 campaign trail until Thursday with a speech at the Democratic National Committee Women’s Leadership Forum in Washington, D.C. She said that this time around, she’s fired up — but admitted to being a reluctant campaigner during the…

For more than 10 years, Richmond, Va.’s oldest municipal burial ground for people of African descent has been covered over by an active parking lot owned by Virginia Commonwealth University. The dead cannot speak, so Richmond’s African-American community has been fighting to remove the parking lot and protect its ancestral legacy. Richmond, former capital of…

During the week of May 22-26, hundreds of Americans are expected to converge in Jackson, Miss., to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Rides. Between May and December of 1961, the nonviolent protest against segregation in the Deep South — which continued despite the Supreme Court’s outlawing of such practices — saw 436 black…

When President Obama takes to the podium Thursday to deliver his vision of the Middle East, he will need all the magic of his oratory. In his two years in office, his message to allies and enemies in the world’s most contentious region has been confusing, at best. His administration has angered both Israelis and…

Don’t judge Dr. Cornel West’s most recent verbal assault on President Barack Obama against the backdrop of his endowed chair at Princeton, his frequent and perplexing appearances on popular talk shows, his Matrix cameo or his quixotic foray into rap. Don’t even judge him as the president’s highest-profile critic among the black intelligentsia — though…

Princeton professor Cornel West is on an anti-Obama tear, and tonight he took it to MSNBC’s The Ed Show. West complained about the president’s record sticking up for the poor and working class, and when asked by the left-wing news show host to explain why he said President Obama has “a certain fear of free…

Michelle Alexander wrote a beautiful piece in the New York Times last weekend. She argued that America has imprisoned far too many people, far too many of them black, and the nation must come to a new moral accounting. We must eliminate excessive sentences for low-level offenses, we must fight the vested interest that millions…

“Name the two teachers who have taught you the most at Broad Street High.” The seemingly innocent inquiry was posed to the students at the high school by three African-American students belonging to the organization Students Involved in Community Change: Katana Frazier, Meleena Frazier and Antwanette Keys. The answers they got, however, had bigger consequences…

Michael Alison Chandler of the Washington Post reports that President Obama addressed graduates of a historic African-American high school in south Memphis, Tenn., during a commencement ceremony Monday, marking a milestone for 155 seniors and a success story for an impoverished and long-struggling urban school. Obama told the packed Cook Convention Center, about a mile…

One year after the community-organizing group ACORN disbanded — after an undercover video scandal and a denial of federal funds by Congress — the organization’s former president is back. Today Bertha Lewis is at the helm of the Black Institute, her newly created “action tank” dedicated to immigration reform, environmental justice, education and economic fairness.…