News & Current Affairs

How much does a full-time worker earning the current minimum wage of $7.25 per hour make in one year? This worker earns only $15,080, which is $4,000 below the federal poverty line for a family of three. Most people would agree that this is not a livable salary anywhere in the nation, especially for families with children. Raising the minimum wage would make a significant difference for all Americans—and people of color in particular; it would increase the total combined wages of people of color by $16.1 billion.

The conference is held at a key point in history. The reparations movement has floundered here, but it is growing in the Caribbean.

In Tuscaloosa today, nearly one in three black students attends a school that looks as if Brown v. Board of Education never happened.

Black males are in the news. For a constituency that is a mere six percent of the population, they occupy a position that is unique in its visibility and vulnerability. On any given Sunday, like modern gladiators, they display their athletic prowess before audiences composed largely of wealthy white ticketholders at basketball and football arenas throughout the country. They are similarly ubiquitous among the talent in the music industry, supplying a steady stream of singers and producers, from Quincy Jones and Berry Gordy to Jay-Z and Pharrell Williams.

Washington, DC Mayor Vincent Gray Monday signed the marijuana decriminalization bill passed last month by the city council. It’s not quite a done deal yet, though — Congress has 60 working days to object, but to stop the bill, it must pass a resolution blocking it, and President Obama must sign it. So it appears likely that the nation’s capital will have decriminalized pot possession by the time Congress leaves town for the August recess.

On his way into work every morning, Chokwe Lumumba, the late mayor of Jackson, Miss., used to pass a historical marker: “Jackson City Hall: built 1846-7 by slave labor.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — African-Americans and Latinos are losing economic ground when compared with whites in the areas of employment and income as the United States pulls itself out of the Great Recession, the latest State of Black America report from the National Urban League says.