Interview with Kali Akuno who was the Coordinator of Special Projects and External Funding for the late mayor Chokwe Lumumba in Jackson, MS.
I recently attended the release of the National Urban League’s Annual State of Black America Report at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. The Report is an extremely important document because it provides key indicators of Black progress in a number of social and economic areas in relationship to White Americans.
Celebrities served as more than just pretty faces at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner this weekend. While they were in town, several big names, from basketball stars to musicians, also stopped by the week’s Sunday news talk shows to get in a word about policy.
NEWARK, N.J. – On one level, the race to succeed U.S. Sen. Cory Booker as mayor of New Jersey’s largest city is a local political contest with the candidates debating issues familiar to urban America: intractable violent crime, a struggling school district challenged by charter schools, a perpetual battle to attract development and create jobs.
On October 22, 1949, The New Yorker published a report by Lillian Ross on that year’s Miss America Pageant. It begins,
There are thirteen million women in the United States between the ages of eighteen and twenty-eight. All of them were eligible to compete for the title of Miss America in the annual contest staged in Atlantic City last month if they were high-school graduates, were not and had never been married, and were not Negroes.
As prosecutors across Maryland wait for the new law that will remove criminal penalties for possessing small amounts of marijuana, they’re taking a patchwork approach in the way they handle such cases.
Impacted communities have long slammed U.S. policies of mass incarceration that are locking up more people than any other country in the world. Now that criticism is also resounding from the highly-regarded National Research Council (an arm of the National Academy of Sciences), which issued a devastating report this week charging that “unprecedented” levels incarceration are spreading great social harm.
The individual analyses of the economists and drug policyexperts, signed by five Nobel Prize winners in economics, expose the collateral damage of the drug war and offer suggestions on how the policies can—and should—change.
The war on drugs has been a $1tn failure. For more than four decades, governments around the world have pumped huge sums of money into ineffective and repressive anti-drug efforts.
Over the past several days, the news has been full of stories about LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling and the racist outburst that’s gotten him banned for life by the NBA. But another story Vox wrote about this month that’s gotten far less attention probably tells us more — and something more disturbing — about how racism works in America today.
Leon Jenkins tendered his resignation Thursday in the wake of the scandal involving the L.A. Clippers owner, whom the organization planned to honor this month.