Working for change
In light of the conversations about police abuse, unwarranted stops and arrests and homicide cases involving black people and police officers, many black people get angry, maybe have a march and then go home to await the next incident. Amos …
Africa and Obama ‘On the Move’
President Obama continues to be strategic about how he represents his race, genealogy and his commitment to promote and sustain African freedom and empowerment. The president’s historic trip to Kenya and to Ethiopia is indicative of his distinctive characteristic of …
Breaking new ground in Ferguson
From the ashes of a Ferguson, Mo., convenience store burned in the unrest following Michael Brown’s death will rise the new Urban League Community Empowerment Center.
White racism costs white people, too
Although he forged a distinguished career as a 10-term Republican Congressman from the early 1950s to the early 1970s, and later as a judge on the Virginia Supreme Court, Richard H. Poff is but a minor footnote in American history. …
Vanquishing the Confederate flag
A flag of any sort represents a country or a cause. Displaying the Confederate flag in the United States of America — whether it is the battle flag or another — is an issue of symbolism and statutory law. Last …
A small step toward justice
On Tuesday, President Obama did something I thought he should have started in 2010 when he signed the Fair Sentencing Act — he commuted the sentences of 46 people in federal prison on drug offenses.
Mobility in more ways than one
If you had to guess the single strongest factor in determining who escapes poverty, what do you think it would be? Perhaps surprisingly, the answer is transportation.
Free Press exposé propelled fight against racist flag
It was mid-summer 1992. A black airman with the Virginia Air National Guard walked into the Richmond Free Press newsroom and asked to see a reporter.
A cue from Frederick Douglass
As our nation prepares for its annual celebration of Independence Day, I re-read Frederick Douglass’ Fourth of July speech delivered 163 years ago in Rochester, N.Y. I look at it with a specific eye toward what we can learn from …
Economic clout can create change
There’s a lesson to be learned from the Confederate flag quickly and unexpectedly falling into disfavor following the murder of nine Bible-studying African-Americans, including the pastor, at Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, S.C. The lesson is that the economic clout …
Freedom from a long-lost cause
Could this, at last, be the end of the Civil War? Or, as some fans of Southern heritage call it, the War Between the States? Or the War of Northern Aggression?
Black Press
In recognition of the 75th anniversary of the National Newspaper Publishers Association, it is important to emphasize both the historical and contemporary mission, value and success of the Black Press in America. For the past 188 years black Americans have …
Forgive student loan debt
By the time you read this, millions of college students will have graduated and be looking for jobs. Many will be going on to grad school and millions suddenly will be faced with paying off college loans or contemplating obtaining …
Charity no substitute for justice
In his speech the night before his murder, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. repeated the Biblical parable of the Good Samaritan who stopped and helped the desperate traveler who had been beaten, robbed and left half dead as he journeyed …
The black-on-black murder myth
Conservative blogs, websites, newspapers and pundits are at it again, screaming that young black males are killing each other with abandon in city after city. They repeatedly toss out the supposedly raging murder violence in Baltimore, Chicago and New York …
