Category: Commentary

August 2013 represents the 50th anniversary of the historic March on Washington. Publicly associated with Dr. King’s famous “I have a Dream” speech, this march brought more than 250,000 people to Washington, D.C. to demand freedom and jobs. Initiated by Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters President A. Philip Randolph, this became a joint project with […]

“It is better to be prepared for an opportunity and not have one than to have an opportunity and not be prepared.” – Whitney M. Young In August 1963, more than a quarter of a million people gathered in Washington, D.C. to march for jobs and equality. The Great March for Jobs and Freedom was […]

On April 4, 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stepped to the podium of the Riverside Church in New York to vigorously proclaim his opposition to the War in Vietnam. It was one of the most powerful orations among numerous remarkable speeches delivered during his brief but extraordinary life. In articulating a persuasive moral and […]

Forty years ago, the Supreme Court created an unmitigated disaster for our nation’s school children when it ruled on the case of San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez. The 5-4 decision allowed Texas to fund school districts on the basis of locally raised tax dollars, confining children in poor communities to underfunded schools. It […]

A few years ago, Dereck Davis was walking home from work when some men came up, held a gun to his kidneys and robbed him. He held that anger inside for years. Years later, as a member of the Maryland House of Delegates, when the issue of repealing the death penalty was introduced, Davis’s traumatic […]

“All types of conniving methods are still being used to prevent Negroes from becoming registered voters,” Dr. King asserted during his 1957 Give Us the Ballot remarks at the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom in Washington. “The denial of this sacred right is a tragic betrayal of the highest mandates of our democratic tradition.” As we […]

(TriceEdneyWire.com) – The selection of Argentinian Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio as the next leader of the Catholic Church was, in some ways, inevitable. Latin America is home to the largest Catholic population in the world, and it is long past time for the tradition of selecting European popes to end. Hopefully, Cardinal Bergoglio, to be […]

As a result of Ohio’s Republican Senator Rob Portman’s declaration last week that he now supports homosexual marriage, I am once again compelled to ask: Why are Christians and conservatives constantly apologizing for what they believe? Portman said he changed his position because his son told him that he was homosexual. Typically, I would not […]

On March 4 Oberlin College in Ohio, which has always had an outsized role in the history of Black higher education, cancelled classes for a day and instead held a “Day of Solidarity” in response to a month-long series of hate speech being scrawled on various buildings, doors, and posters throughout the campus. The words […]

Last week the Maryland Legislature passed legislation abolishing the death penalty. I believe the time has come to repeal the death penalty because it is racially-biased, demonstrably unreliable, and not an effective deterrent. This debate is full of practical, legal, and moral questions that deserve our full attention. Maryland’s justice system is strong. Our law […]

As a father, husband and son, Women’s History Month has special meaning to me. March is an especially appropriate time, as President Obama declared, “. . . to remember those who fought to make our freedom as real for our daughters as for our sons.” In my “Bread and Roses” column during March of last […]

With just 27 words in 1791, America’s Second Amendment paved a blood-drenched trail for legal access to modern-day weapons used in videogame-like fashion to gun-down fellow citizens, military-style. Now, after all the mass carnage of 222 years of the freedom to bear arms –there’s a sudden political epiphany for urgent “gun control” to ostensibly curb […]