Politics

Never mind the model of the “Tiger Mother,” Amy Chua’s controversial version of tough parental love pushing sometimes reluctant children to heights of achievement. Marian Wright Edelman’s hopes are far more basic. The founder of the Children’s Defense Fund has always been a fighter. In the week during which the country celebrated the achievements of…

The core leadership of the Atlanta-based Southern Christian Leadership Conference insists that it was not blindsided by today’s news that Martin Luther King Jr.’s daughter Bernice is turning down the presidency of the organization that her father co-founded back in 1957. “We have not been leadership-less, and we still are not leadership-less,” Dr. Howard Creecy…

Michael Steele, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, recently went on Chris Matthews’ MSNBC show and chatted, among other things, about the lack of blacks in the Republican Party. “We could have used a few more brothers in the house; there’s no doubt about that,” Steele said when Matthews made the ingenious and original…

By Eugene Robinson This whole health-care thing isn’t quite working out the way Republicans planned. My guess is that they’ll soon try to change the subject — but I’m afraid they’re already in too deep. Wednesday’s vote to repeal President Obama’s health insurance reform law was supposed to be a crowning triumph. We heard confident…

Today marks the second anniversary of Barack Obama’s inauguration, and his administration is officially looking forward. To 2012, that is. The New York Times reports that Obama plans to close the Office of Political Affairs at the White House and restructure to prepare for the 2012 election. Also, in a first for a sitting president,…

Few things are more infuriating than when people lecture African Americans on where we should fall on rights-related issues because we’ve been oppressed and ought to know better — as if we owe a debt for our freedom that can only be repaid by signing on to their point of view, without going through the…

Today is the midpoint of Barack Obama’s first term as president of the United States of America. When scholars look back at this moment a century from now, what will they make of it? They, of course, will have the advantage of knowing facts about which we can only speculate, starting with whether Obama was…

For more than 50 years, Julian Bond has been a human rights and civil rights leader. In 1960 he co-founded the SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Bond spent 20 years in the Georgia Legislature after first being denied a seat because of his outspoken views against the Vietnam War. For 11 years, until 2010,…

Twenty-four months after President Obama was sworn in as American’s first African-American president, 1,006 people of all races responding to an online survey by The Root are at times sharply divided on his achievements, and particularly on the racial climate in the country: * While just 15 percent of whites believe that hate crimes, police…