Category: OPINION

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 […]

Last week I joined Rev. Al Sharpton and the National Action Network on the march from Selma to Montgomery. I am one of the 40 percent of Americans who are independent of both the major parties. Back in the days of Ross Perot, the media called guys like me “angry white men.” Along the route, […]

Sybrina Fulton knows what she will be doing tomorrow. It is the same thing she did yesterday. And the same thing she will do today. “I cry every day,” she said Sunday on TV One’s Washington Watch with Roland Martin. “I just don’t understand. My son’s gone and this guy has never been arrested.” Her […]

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 […]

A group of leading Black intellectuals met at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture to discuss the current plight of African Americans in the United States. Curiously, at the recent forum, which took place Feb. 26 and was entitled “Black America: A Prescription for the Future,” alongside their programs, attendees were given an […]

It’s undemocratic to be negative about negative ads. That said, there are some politicians who misuse negative ads, and I’ll get to that in a moment. In a democracy, negative ads play an important role. In a representative democracy – which is what the United States is, rather than a true democracy — there is […]

As we approach the 2012 election, the fear that many Americans will be denied their right to vote is increasingly becoming a reality. A growing number of states have enacted voter suppression laws requiring identification to vote, imposing stricter voter registration requirements or preventing early voting or same-day voting — tactics that will push out […]

Adorned in a freshly-ironed dress and satchel for her books, six-year-old Ruby Bridges walked past an angry mob and into the doors of William Frantz Elementary School. The girl’s father was initially reluctant to let his daughter become the school’s first African American student, but her mother felt strongly that the move was needed not […]

Just look at the numbers. The U.S. economy was shedding millions of jobs at the peak of the recession in late 2008 and early 2009. Then Congress passed an economic stimulus package – heavy on green energy investments – in February 2009. Within months, the number of lost jobs began to decline and by 2010, […]

What if you left the United States for a short trip abroad, but when you tried to come home to your job, family and life in America, your government would not let you on the plane? What if, when you asked when you could fly home, you were told “never”? For some American Muslims, this […]

Recent righteous political rhetoric has made it easy to forget the time when religion — specifically, America’s anti-Catholic bias — was used to cast John F. Kennedy as a scary “other” so beholden to the pope as to threaten America’s democracy. Recognizing the importance of making his allegiance to our Constitution’s separation and balance of […]