Category: OPINION

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 […]

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 […]