Category: Commentary

It takes a village! Accolades to all who kept the emails, phone calls and press conferences going to remove the dead-lock on Loretta Lynch’s confirmation. History was made in a 56 to 43 vote, April 23, 2015. Loretta Lynch, an extremely capable attorney, was confirmed as United States Attorney General. She is the third woman […]

Julianne Malveaux You know their names – Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice – because these African American men were unarmed and killed by “law enforcement” officers. Their names have been part of a litany invoked when police shootings are discussed. Their deaths have been part of the impetus for the Black Lives Matter movement, […]

Jonathan Newton So just to be clear on this, the riots didn’t start yesterday. Some media sources and observers would suggest that the riots in Baltimore started on 4/27/2015 around noon.  However taking a more critical look it’s clear the riot in Baltimore had its genesis much earlier than yesterday.  To understand this you must […]

Dr. E. Faye Williams For the purpose of clarity, I sometimes begin a discussion with a definition because some will instinctively revise a definition based upon their personal opinion or a specific context.  The word for this discussion is: TERRORISM!  I chose this word because I’d rather analyze the epidemic of indecent police behaviors rationally […]

James Clingman Remember the Jena Six?  Some 15,000 to 20,000 protesters went to Jena, La., in 2006 to demonstrate against injustice.  After all the speeches, threats, marches and church rallies, the people went home and nothing really changed.  The prosecutors did their thing and the system rolled right over Mychal Bell and the other five defendants. […]

Congressman Elijah Cummings April is National Minority Health Month, a time each year when Americans of Color are encouraged to give special consideration to preserving our families’ health — and the health of our nation. As a call to action, we are reminded of former Surgeon General David Satcher’s finding that more than 886,000 premature […]

Julianne Malveaux When a colleague dropped the line, “You can’t hashtag your way to freedom,” I loved it! I laughed out loud, and promised that I’d not borrow the line, but steal it because I was so enamored of it. I’ve used it quite a few times since then, and gotten my share of grins […]

George E. Curry When the Supreme Court gutted a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act nearly two years ago in Shelby County v. Holder, many of us suspected that Chief Justice John Roberts in particular was distorting the severity of voting violations in jurisdictions covered by the act. As a popular GEICO commercial […]

George H. Lambert Jr. There’s no need to rehearse here the facts of what happened in North Charleston, S. C. on April 4, the latest fatal shooting of an unarmed Black man by a White police officer.  Not to mention another fatal shooting just a few days earlier in Tulsa County, Okla. According to authorities, […]

Dr. Jamal Bryant is pastor of Empowerment Temple in Baltimore . (Courtesy Photo) In the critically acclaimed book, Why We Can’t Wait, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said it best, “Three hundred years of humiliation, abuse and deprivation cannot be expected to find voice in a whisper.” In the awe-inspiring treatise, ranked #78 on Modern […]

Dayvon Love It is time that we dispel the mythology around Maryland being a political progressive state. Being a Democrat in Maryland is pretty meaningless as an indicator of your political ideology or values. We live in a state in which a 3rd of the population is made up of Black people, yet the Maryland […]