By Lee A. Daniels
I want to thank two people in the trans-Atlantic Anglo-American community—Rush Limbaugh here in the U.S., and Nick Griffin, head of Britain’s major white-supremacist party—for their bracing directness.

By Paula L. Woods
Bottom line, Precious is an emotional beat-down of a film, raw as an open wound, the script and Daniels’ stripped-down direction taking their cues from the novel in telling the story of an illiterate 16 year-old, pregnant with her second child yet still in junior high school.

By Doug Miller
Former Massachusetts legislator Edward Brooke III, a Republican and the first African American elected by popular vote to the U.S. Senate, was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal on October 28, becoming only the 150th American citizen to receive the award since George Washington.

By Eisa Nefertari Ulen
Anna In-Between, the seventh book from acclaimed author Elizabeth Nunez, is one of the finest novels published this year. Nunez has made each word choice with the economy of a poet. The result is elegant prose: substantive, meaningful, but never wordy or clunky, just beautifully satisfying and thought-provoking.

By C. Nicole Mason
Lately you cannot turn on the television without some version of baby daddy or mama drama played out on talk shows,with black men and women usually at the center of the heated discussion for all the world to see. The fate of children too often hinging on four now infamous words–You are not the father!

By TaRessa Stovall
“Why don’t you guys study like the kids from Africa?”
This is the question posed by a white male high school teacher to his “virtually all African-American” 12th grade English class, where not a single student raised their hand when asked if they have a father living at home.

Three years ago this week, Jeffrey Deskovic was exonerated in New York after serving nearly 16 years for a murder he did not commit. Deskovic was 16 years old when he allegedly gave a false confession after six hours of grueling interrogation. He was convicted despite DNA testing presented at his trial pointing to his innocence. That same evidence was compared to a DNA database at the Innocence Project’s request in 2006. It matched the profile of a prisoner, who confessed to committing the crime alone, exonerating Deskovic.

By The Editors
The Howard University School of Law, which for nearly a century and a half has supplied much of black America’s legal talent, celebrated its 140th anniversary at a gala dinner October 24 in Washington, D.C. True to institutional form, law school officials celebrated the school’s historic record of service by honoring the service of others.

By Doug Miller
The H1N1 swine flu pandemic amounts to a national emergency, according to President Barack Obama, who issued a formal declaration that frees medical providers from time-consuming federal regulations if the virus threatens to put local healthcare facilities under medical siege.

By Doug Miller
Opposition to an eleventh-hour change in a Census Bureau funding bill is building. Minority legislators and a widening array of civil rights advocacy groups have voiced concerns that a proposed amendment by U.S. Senators David Vitter (R-LA) and Robert Bennett (R-UT) will have a chilling effect on Census participation and unnecessarily add hundreds of millions of dollars to the process.