Politics

Albert Murray was the as-told-to author of Good Morning Blues: The Autobiography of Count Basie (1985). He first met Basie in the 1970s, though he’d followed Basie’s band since the 30s. In 1958, he wrote this about Basie to Ralph Ellison. (It was published in Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert…

CINCINNATI—The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People will be 100 years old next year, and judging from the 3,000 or so folks who showed up for the organization’s convention in Cincinnati last week, so will many of its members. Though the nation’s largest and most important civil rights organization now boasts about 35,000…

Maybe it was that we had just come through a humiliating week of watching a parade of white, male senators talk down to a highly accomplished Latina federal appellate court judge and nominee to the United States Supreme Court, but I wasn’t feeling President Obama’s “tough love” message to the NAACP national convention. Obama delivered…

CINCINNATI—If any candidate for president ever demonstrated that he had guts, it was John McCain when he dared to appear before the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. It’s unlikely that the Arizona senator has faced a crowd so skeptical since he confronted his torturers in the Hanoi Hilton POW camp during the…

Depending on whom you ask, the July 21 cover of The New Yorker has become cause for outrage, confusion and partisan glee. Given the flare-ups surrounding race and representation that have rocked the 2008 presidential race, it’s easy to treat the satirical cover—of a be-turbaned Barack and a be-afroed Michelle Obama—and other “racialist” images of…

Barack Obama’s address to the NAACP convention was unspectacular, as these things go. It’s just that we’d heard all his material before, as good as it is. Repeat tomorrow.What made the NAACP speech significant wasn’t what Obama said and it didn’t happen in the convention hall. Its significance was in a crowd thousands-deep, two blocks…

Poor John McCain. He must be asking himself, “How am I supposed to follow that?” That, of course, is Barack Obama’s rousing appearance at the NAACP convention in Cincinnati Monday night. When McCain delivers his own speech to the nation’s oldest and largest civil rights organization on Wednesday morning, the ovation Obama triggered may still…

Are you laughing yet? If not, you’re probably joining the growing chorus of jeers that has assailed the July 21 The New Yorker magazine cover illustration by artist Barry Blitt, dubbed “The Politics of Fear.” In it, a turban-wearing Barack Obama gives his Afro-wearing, machine-gun gripping wife Michelle a pound as they stand in the…

You gotta admire, on some cynical level, a crook who can steal your money and make you believe it’s your own fault for getting jacked. That’s perhaps the most galling part about the con-job banks and lenders are still running on America. They spent a decade creating the “mortgage meltdown”—knocking down prescient state-level safeguards, dreaming…

As the Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor get under way this week on Capitol Hill, some members of the Senate have a major decision to make about their identity and their future. Will they continue to advance divisive politics rooted in America’s sad history of racism and exclusion? Or can they…