(To Be Equal #12) – There’s no other way to say it. Black America is in crisis. Over the past year, we have been bombarded with headlines that continue to drive home the longstanding challenges faced by Black and Brown communities in our nation. From the killings of unarmed Black males at the hands of […]
Commentary
Urgent Action Alert: Tell Your Senators to Swiftly Confirm Loretta Lynch as the First African American Woman U.S. Attorney General
By Marc Morial – U.S. Attorney Lynch has distinguished herself as a highly experienced, independent lawyer dedicated to equal justice under the law. In addition, Ms. Lynch would represent major progress by becoming the nation’s first African American woman to serve as U.S. Attorney General. Loretta Lynch’s credentials speak for themselves. She holds a powerful […]
Malcolm X to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz – The Metamorphosis of a Militant in Mecca
By Marc H. Morial (To Be Equal) – “You may be shocked by these words coming from me. But on this pilgrimage, what I have seen, and experienced, has forced me to rearrange much of my thought-patterns previously held, and to toss aside some of my previous conclusions. This was not too difficult for me. […]
The Carter G. Woodson Legacy
By Julianne Malveaux – The racial differential in the poverty rate is staggering. Last time I checked, about 12 percent people in the United States, one in eight people are poor. Depending on race and ethnicity, however, poverty is differently experienced. Fewer than one in ten whites are poor, more than one in four African […]
DuBois and Trotter: My Civil Rights Heroes
By George E. Curry, NNPA – In the interest of full disclosure, I have been a W.E.B. DuBois fanatic since my teenage years in Tuscaloosa, Ala. I have a healthy collection of books by and about DuBois, including David Levering Lewis’ two-volume biography of DuBois (W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American […]
Giuliani’s Words Do More than Hurt – They Divide
To Be Equal #8 By Marc H. Morial – After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York City, I brought a delegation of mayors to meet with the city’s then-mayor, Rudolph Giuliani. The delegation’s goal was to help restore confidence in the still-traumatized city and help rebuild what had been so inhumanly destroyed. […]
Republican Diversity: Blacks Need Not Apply
By Raynard Jackson NNPA Columnist Unlike the Republican National Committee (RNC), our national party apparatus, most of the 50 state party committees are stuck in the 1960s when it comes to the Black community. Exhibit A for this was the annual weekend gathering for the Republican Party of Virginia (RPV) that took place two weeks […]
Breathing Life into a Movement
By Julianne Malveaux, NNPA Columnist – “I can’t breathe,” gasped Eric Garner, again and again and again. “I can’t breathe,” he said, as several police officers were on top of him, choking him, pushing his head onto the concrete sidewalk. The man was not resisting arrest; he simply had the temerity to ask a police […]
NFL’s New Personal Conduct Policy a Step in the Right Direction
Washington, DC – In response to the National Football League’s (NFL) recently released revamped Personal Conduct Policy for players and other employees that was ratified unanimously by 32 league owners, Melanie L. Campbell, convener of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation’s Black Women’s Roundtable (BWR), issued the following statement: “The Black Women’s Roundtable is […]