By Dr. Maulana Karenga — The celebration of freedom is to be encouraged and applauded everywhere and all the time, and the celebration of Juneteenth, June 19th as Emancipation Day,…
By Earl Ofari Hutchinson — Let’s crunch some numbers in the 2016 presidential election. Trump and rival Hillary Clinton made a combined 250 plus official campaign vote trips to Pennsylvania,…
Marking the holiday and wrestling with our troubled past is the way to find the path to a more equitable future. By Barrett Holmes Pitner — With the South rising again on the watch of President Donald Trump, who plans to turn the Fourth of July this year from a celebration of America to a celebration of himself, it’s time for Americans who champion equality to begin celebrating Juneteenth. June…
By Kelebogile Zvobgo — Between 1850 and 1950, thousands of African American men, women and children were victims of lynchings: public torture and killings carried out by white mobs. Lynchings were…
By Sir Ronald Sanders — Make no mistake about it, the election of St Vincent and the Grenadines – one of the world’s smallest states – to a non-permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) is both an important and timely event. The election, primarily by the world’s developing states, has occurred when there is increased intolerance of small states by larger and powerful governments determined to enforce…
By Earl Ofari Hutchinson — The Central Park 5 has been the textbook poster case for the one thing that has consistently and horribly racially disfigured America’s criminal justice system….
By Nicholas Guyatt — Were the Founding Fathers responsible for American slavery? William Lloyd Garrison, the celebrated abolitionist, certainly thought so. In an uncompromising address in Framingham, Massachusetts, on July 4, 1854, Garrison denounced the hypocrisy of a nation that declared that “all men are created equal” while holding nearly four million African-Americans in bondage. The US Constitution was hopelessly implicated in this terrible crime, Garrison claimed: it kept free…
By Dr. Julianne Malveaux — I love graduations! I thoroughly enjoy the sense of achievement and possibility that permeates the air. Graduations signify an ending, but the term “commencement” is…
But the persistence of racially biased policing means that unless American policing reckons with its racist roots, it is likely to keep repeating mistakes of the past. Connie Hassett-Walker, The Conversation — Outrage over racial profiling and the killing of African Americans by police officers and vigilantes in recent years helped give rise to the Black Lives Matter movement. But tensions between the police and black communities are nothing new. There are many precedents to the Ferguson,…
By Julianne Malveaux — Many know them as the Central Park Five, but filmmaker Ava DuVernay forces to us see the five wrongfully convicted men as individuals. Their names are…
Even highly informed commentators lack a shared understanding of what the word means. By Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic — Earlier this year, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, and other Democratic presidential aspirants began speaking positively about reparations, in contrast to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, who opposed the policy. Just 26 percent of voters favor reparations in polls. In the telling of The New York Times, this shift is due to the fact…
By Dr. Maulana Karenga — As a new and expanded round of reparations discussions and discourse take place in the public square and in the current political campaigns, seeking promised…