Category: OPINION

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 […]

Marian Wright Edelman Many children and families eagerly look forward to the end of the school year and the carefree days of summer, playing outside in the warm sun, splashing and swimming in pools and at beaches, and gathering with family and friends for backyard barbeques. But for more than 17 million children, the end […]

Congressman Elijah Cummings Nationally, we now have witnessed more than five years of significant job creation. Unemployment, which reached 10 percent during the depths of the Bush Recession, has been cut nearly in half. Yet, for far too many of our nation’s working families, the positive economic statistics heralding a “recovery” from the Bush Recession […]

Dr. E. Faye Williams President, National Congress of Black Women The debate on Loretta Lynch continues beyond human understanding.  A simple review of politics in Washington since President Barack Obama has been President defies imagination. Cases in point are the 2014 nominations of Loretta Lynch for U.S. Attorney General and Ashton Carter for Secretary of […]

Yosef Alfredo Antonio ben-Jochannan, known to the African world as “Dr. Ben,” believed that education belonged to any member of his race who wanted it. Perhaps that was because of the 20th century tradition of ad-hoc “street universities,” with step-ladder orators as varied as Malcolm X and “Porkchop” Davis, a tradition he understood.  Perhaps it […]

George H. Lambert Jr. It may seem strange, but I have noticed that traditions thrive only when they are allowed to grow and change. Cling to them too rigidly, and they tend to wither and lose their relevance. One clear example that springs to my mind–the Easter Monday festivities at the National Zoo. This year’s […]

Lekan Oguntoyinbo (Courtesy Photo) Long before China and India became the economic wonders of Asia, there was Singapore, a small, diverse country with no natural resources that took the audacious step of breaking away from the Malaysian federation in 1965 to become an independent nation. Lee Kuan Yew, the new country’s founding father, knew that […]

“What the people want is very simple: they want an America as good as its promise.” – Texas Congresswoman Barbara C. Jordan Marc H. Morial There’s no other way to say it.  Black America is in crisis. Over the past year, we have been bombarded with headlines that continue to drive home the longstanding challenges […]

Benjamin F. Chavis Jr. I know from firsthand experience that the criminal justice system today in the United States is in serious and urgent need of reform, repair and restructuring. Millions of families have been devastated by the overcriminalization of people in America. Black American families in particular have suffered and continue to suffer disproportionately […]