By Lee A. Daniels
They were criminals, all 400-plus of them, according to the duly enacted laws of the states of the Old Confederacy – lawbreakers, ‘race mixers,’ and disturbers of the peace.  Government officials and editorialists across the South called them “communists,” “socialists,” and “outside agitators.” They were beaten, with the connivance of the police, by Ku Klux Klan thugs in Alabama. They were jailed in Mississippi, first in the city jail in Jackson, and then, in the notorious Parchman state penitentiary. Their very lives were in danger.

They were the Freedom Riders.

By Mark Lassiter
On Tuesday, December 1, a potentially historic mayoral election will take place in Atlanta, Georgia. The November 3 election led to a runoff between City Councilor Mary Norwood, a white woman running as an Independent, though some say she’s Republican; and Georgia State Senator Kasim Reed, a Democrat who has the support of both the local hip-hop stars and the old-school civil rights veterans.

By Deborah Rudacille
The Montgomery County Conservation Corps combines job training with intensive counseling and character-building. But it is the promise of earning a GED that gets most corps members in the door.

Nine years ago this week, Carlos Lavernia was exonerated through DNA testing in Texas. He was convicted based in part on an eyewitness identification in a flawed lineup. The victim testified at trial that Lavernia was the only man in the lineup who “anywhere near resembles” the perpetrator. In order to reduce misidentifications, it’s critical that lineup participants resemble the witness descriptions of the perpetrator.

By Khalil Gibran Muhammad
Everywhere I turn these days I keep seeing or hearing the words, “No More Excuses.” From black self-help book titles to black pundits on CNN, these three words have become the mantra of post-racialism in the Age of President Obama. Whether intended or not, the mantra fuels the belief that because of individual black achievements, we have finally reached the promised land of a color-blind, equal-opportunity America.

By TaRessa Stovall
Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie,  a writer since age 7, was challenged to give the talk of her life in under 20 minutes. The result is nothing less than spellbinding.

By TaRessa Stovall
In a victory not only for a gifted athlete, but for humanity as a whole, Caster Semenya, the gifted South African teen track star who was mired in controversy over confusion about her gender, was found “innocent of any wrong” doing by the International Association of Athletics Federation (IAAF) and allowed to retain her 800m gold medal, title and prize money.

By The Editors
Thursday, November 19, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions conducted a hearing on the nomination of Jacqueline A. Berrien, Associate Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund to be the new Chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

By Ellen Feldman
In March, 1931, as the Depression was deepening and 200,000 young people under the age of twenty-one were hoboing the country in search of an odd job, or a few scraps of food, or the little bit of fun that was supposed to be the birthright of youth, a group of young black and white men got into a fight on a freight train going from Chattanooga to Memphis, Tennessee, by way of northern Alabama.

No crime in America, let alone a crime never committed, has resulted in as many trials, convictions, reversals, retrials, and Supreme Court decisions, including a seminal 1935 ruling. Collectively, the nine young men spent more than a hundred years in some of the worst jails and prisons in Depression-era America. Only one of them lived to be pardoned.

By TaRessa Stovall
Experts call it “food insecurity … meaning that the food intake is reduced and … disrupted at times … because the household lacked money and other resources for food.” And not surprisingly, it’s on the rise.