Category: OPINION

With the economy once again playing such an important role during this election cycle, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released the March unemployment numbers on April 6 amidst great anticipation and perhaps uneasiness. The final numbers showed an 8.2 percent overall jobless rate, a slight drop from the 8.3 percent rate in February, leaving room […]

Ward Four has everything to lose, if Muriel Bowser is not defeated. Bowser has received nearly $ 300,000.00 in campaign contributions, for the April 2012 Primary. This is a huge sum of money for a ward race. Most of her opponents haven’t raised a tenth of what she has raised. The Ward Four Primary race […]

IT’S HIGH TIME, PAST TIME AND OUR TIME… to elect the first African American candidate to the United States Senate from Maryland! One could practically count on one hand the number of African Americans who have served in the U.S. Senate! We represent 12 percent of the American population – yet we have 0 black […]

All of last week, I was in Sanford, Florida, pursuing justice for Trayvon Martin. I listened to community concerns about the Sanford Police Department, and rallied with Trayvon’s parents and 30,000 others in Sanford, a town with only 50,000 residents. As a son, father, brother and uncle, the loss of another young black man in […]

“Diverse democracies depend on diverse people who know and respect each other.” John Payton Over the past century, the most powerful force behind America’s on-going struggle for equality has been an outstanding group of civil rights attorneys. Imagine where we would be today without lawyers like Charles Hamilton Houston – “the man who killed Jim […]

I’m incredibly saddened by the passing of John A. Payton, head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Our nation has lost a brilliant warrior for justice, and I’ve lost a dear friend and colleague in the movement. I first had the pleasure to meet John during the Clinton era. What I most remember about him […]

Led by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, we are fighting back against Republican-sponsored voter identification laws and other voter suppression schemes that – left unchallenged – could deny millions of Americans their fundamental right to vote this year. All who love America and our democratic system have an important stake in the outcome of this […]

Every parent raising Black sons knows the dilemma: deciding how soon to have the talk. Choosing the words to explain to your beautiful child that there are some people who will never like or trust him just because of who he is—including some who should be there to protect him, but will instead have the […]

This year marks the centennial of the birth of Bayard Rustin, one of the most significant yet ignored figures in American history. Rustin, a native son of West Chester, was the master strategist of the pinnacle event in American protest politics—the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963. He was also an openly […]

The expression Driving While Black (DWB) was coined to reflect the criminalization of Black drivers through racial profiling that has led in the last few decades to numerous Department of Justice (DOJ) consent decrees in major cities across the U.S to monitor and stymie such prejudicial and arbitrary police practices. Perhaps the federal investigation being […]