Politics

The first black president of the United States and his family hunkered down at one end of a small island, and some of the best and brightest African Americans gathered at the other end: so close, but yet so far away. Maybe it reflects the breadth and range — and the limitations — of what…

A leading black Republican is upset about Sarah Palin’s tweet supporting Dr. Laura Schlessinger, the radio talk show host who couldn’t stop saying the n-word. Timothy Johnson, who as chairman of the Frederick Douglass Foundation works to get African-American Republican officials elected and increase the ranks of black members of the party, says that Sarah…

Something to consider as the Cordoba House Islamic Center continues to get attacked by cowardly pundits and politicians from both parties is the increasing abundance of American Christian missionaries in Iraq. As U.S. combat forces ready their withdrawal from Iraq, conservative estimates are that between 97,000 and 106,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed in the…

Dr. William Jelani Cobb, one of the country’s most visible African-American intellectuals, is an associate professor and chair of the history department at Spelman College in Atlanta. His meditation on the hip-hop aesthetic, To the Break of Dawn, is one of the most important texts on this cultural phenomenon. In his latest book, The Substance…

If you pay only fleeting attention to the news, here’s what you’ll take away from this week’s headlines: “Obama Backs Ground Zero Mosque; Heads to Martha’s Vineyard.” Even though President Barack Obama is prosecuting two wars, battling nearly 10 percent unemployment, boosting border enforcement by $600 million and literally swimming in the Gulf of Mexico…

President Obama’s comments about the controversial mosque proposed for lower Manhattan blindsided a wide swath of Americans. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was one. He had spent several weeks fending off repeated media questions about the mosque. At-risk Democrats on the campaign trail were also blindsided by the president’s sudden decision to speak out…

Every great once in a while, something like Stanley Nelson’s wonderful documentary Freedom Riders appears and is so good that it exhausts all common versions of praise. In it, Nelson and his crew take on a period of history usually misunderstood: a particularly dramatic series of events in 1961, known as the Freedom Rides, when…

President Barack Obama’s sober assessment of the Cordoba House controversy late on Friday — “Muslims have … the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan” — has, as you might imagine, been met with dissimilarly unrestrained caterwauling. Possible Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich said that…

By DeNeen Brown Social activists and civil rights leaders, among them the Rev. Al Sharpton, are planning marches and demonstrations — including the unveiling of a nearly four-story original sculpture on the Mall — on Aug. 28 to coincide with a rally organized by Fox News personality Glenn Beck. Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally, with former…