
By Dr. Julianne Malveaux — Billionaire Mike Bloomberg entered the already-crowded Democratic presidential primary with a splash. His ad buy of about $35 million represents more than half of what…
By Dr. Julianne Malveaux — Billionaire Mike Bloomberg entered the already-crowded Democratic presidential primary with a splash. His ad buy of about $35 million represents more than half of what…
By Terri L. Crawford, JD, The Omaha Star — “Moreover, he shall speak for you to the people; and he will be as a mouth for you …” — Exodus 4:16 As the voice of the people, the Nebraska Democratic Party Black Caucus’ mission is to promote the involvement of Blacks in the political process and the activities of the party at the local, state, and national level. The Caucus…
By Justin Hansford, ACLU — It is common for nations where mass atrocities have taken place to engage in the process of reparation and repair. This process happened in Germany after the Holocaust, South Africa after apartheid, and here in the United States, forty years after the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. As a result, international human rights bodies have sought to lend their expertise to the process, often by…
The traumas visited upon Black bodies for the past 400 years have included physical violence and theft of spirituality, which is linked to today’s mental and spiritual wounds, passed down…
From the beginning, some Americans have been able to move more freely than others. By Ben Fountain, Medium — They were called patrollers or, variously, “paterollers,” “paddyrollers,” or “patterolls,” and they were meant to be part of the solution to Colonial America’s biggest problem, labor. Unlike Great Britain, which had a large, basically immobile peasant class that could be forced to work for subsistence wages, there weren’t enough cheap bodies…
By John W. Whitehead, CounterPunch — “The exile of prisoners to a distant place, where they can ‘pay their debt to society,’ make themselves useful, and not contaminate others with…
By Dr. Maulana Karenga — The Anniversary of the 1965 Watts Revolt occurs in the context of a larger history of Black struggle, sacrifices and achievements: the assassination, sacrifice and…
An Indiana city learns that a weak response to white supremacists has predictable consequences. By Edward Burmila, The Nation — In big cities like Chicago, New York, or Los Angeles, a farmers’ market might not be a center of economic and social life. But in Bloomington, Indiana—with a population of 80,000 when Indiana University is in session—the farmers’ market has run for 45 consecutive years, and it’s a big deal.…
By Ron Hampton — Big-city prosecutors and police chiefs recently attended a summit in Washington, D.C. held at the office of the Police Executive Research Forum, a think tank that…
By Earl Ofari Hutchinson — NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo was finally given the official boot by his department. He was fired for violating department policy. The issue was his use of the chokehold in the slaying of Eric Garner. Police departments nationally scrambled furiously in the aftermath of the chokehold death of Garner in 2014 and the non-indictment then of Pantaleo to publicly declare that they do not use the…
Garner scratched-out a living in the gray market. “Not today,” he said when cops came for him. Now he’s dead. By Bob Hennelly, Salon — On the fifth anniversary of Eric Garner’s homicide we were flooded with the video images of his takedown by NYPD officers. What’s been lost in this retrospective was Mr. Garner’s defiant stand minutes earlier when he was first confronted by the police for the economic “high…
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….