Politics
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Book Excerpt: Before Brown v. Board of Education
Root and Branch: Charles Hamilton Houston, Thurgood Marshall and the Struggle to End Segregation, Rawn James Jr., 2010 In 1935, Thurgood Marshall and Charles Hamilton Houston’s fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha, had been working on plans to file a lawsuit to integrate the University of Maryland. Led by its assistant general counsel Belford V. Lawson Jr.,…
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New York Governor Paterson Drops His Bid to Get Re-elected
The dream is over for New York Governor David Paterson. The Empire State’s first black governor announcedannounce this afternoon that he will withdraw from the race for a new term after news reports that he and New York State Police officials had intervened in a domestic violence incident involving a close aide. At a news…
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Tavis Smiley Was Right
Tavis Smiley’s recent criticisms of the Obama administration’s failure to directly address the concerns of the black community has caused an uproar among black leaders. The Tavis haters are out in full force. It is so ironic because it seems that every time Tavis attempts to criticize and dialogue “out of love,” much of black…
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Health Care and What It Means To Be President
Remember when being the president just meant that you were “the decider”? This was the golden age of George W. Bush, when it really seemed like anyone—anyone—could be president. If we’re honest, it is only the model of the George W. Bush presidency that enables so many people to imagine that Sarah Palin could run…
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Van Jones Sets the Record Straight
Tonight’s NAACP Image Awards telecast isn’t just about recognizing black Hollywood. The group is giving its President’s Award to Van Jones, the erstwhile national “green jobs czar” who was forced out of the Obama administration last year after he became a lightning rod for right-wing ire. Jones, 41, may be “the most misunderstood man in…
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Rangel Broke Ethics Rules For Island Junkets With CBC Members
The House ethics committee has found that one of Congress’s most powerful black lawmakers violated House rules, but didn’t know it. Ways and Means Committee chairman Rep. Charlie Rangel (D, New York) violated House rules by failing to properly disclose financial details of trips to the Caribbean, according to senior congressional officials on Thursday. The…
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Will the Health Care Summit Pay Off for Obama?
Cantor versus Rangel. Boehner versus Biden. Getting health care done versus more of the same. The White House summit to debate health care reform is being characterized as a political cage match with the highest of stakes. But the meeting is also a story of Obama versus Obama. Throughout the debate over what is now…
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Haiti's Development: A Human-Rights Approach
In the wake of the devastating earthquake that struck Haiti last month, thousands of its countrymen are reversing a trend that has dominated life in developing third world countries for decades—they are migrating back to the countryside, after having flocked to the cities in a desperate search for employment. What drove their urban flight was…
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The Austin Plane Crash: White Man’s Anger, Black Man’s Death
So let me see if I have this straight. Joseph Stack, an engineer and anti-tax activist gets good and mad, burns his house to the ground, jumps into his private plane, flies it into The Echelon building housing federal offices in Austin, killing Vernon Hunter, a 67-year-old IRS worker and injuring 13 more. This act…
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Blacks and Education: What We Learn
In 1960, more than 40 percent of adult whites were high-school graduates compared to 23 percent of adult blacks. That’s nearly a 20 percent gap. Now, black and white high-school graduates are nearly the same—87 percent for whites and 83 percent for blacks. College Graduates In 1960, only 3.1 percent of adult black Americans graduated…