By The Editors
For more than a decade, the class-action lawsuit involving tens of thousands of the nation’s black farmers on the one side and the federal Department of Agriculture on the other stood as a dramatic symbol of the institutional racism undermining even black Americans involved in one of America’s mythic occupations.

By Ralph Richardson
Spike Lee and John Singleton are great—and significant—but neither blazed the trail or overcame the odds that the Father of African-American Cinema did. Indeed, they owe their careers to him, though few of the folk who go to see movies today even know who he is, or that he, a black man born less than 20 years after the Civil War, was an innovator and major influence in American cinema.

By Jackie Jones
Over the past 20 years, cancer death rates for men have decreased by 21 percent for men and 15-16 percent for women, but increasing obesity rates threaten to reverse those trends, especially for African-American women, according to Otis Brawley, M.D., chief medical officer for the American Cancer Society.

By Eisa Nefertari Ulen
In her debut collection of poetry, Arc & Hue, Tara Betts articulates deeply-felt human emotion in a lyrical, beautiful way. Betts is a poet for the people.

In 1989, after three trials, Arvin McGee was convicted of the rape of a twenty-year-old woman in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Although McGee maintained his innocence and was suffering from an injury that rendered him physically unable to commit the crime, he was convicted based in part on blood-type testing. McGee was officially exonerated eight years ago this week after Oklahoma authorities re-tested semen samples. The DNA profile matched another man who was already incarcerated in Oklahoma.

By The Editors
Washington, D.C. — February 22 — In a closely-watched case involving the hiring of black firefighters in Chicago, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. today urged the U.S. Supreme Court to prevent mis-interpreted technical rules from blocking the correction of discrimination in employment.

By The Editors
In the past six months two separate bodies investigating New York State’s juvenile prisons – one a federal agency; the other, a state-appointed commission — have produced scathing reports of a system beset by longstanding calamitous problems.

By Janet Singleton
Several days have passed since Maria Ragland Davis, Adriel Johnson, and Gopi Podila were murdered in a mass shooting at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). But what could make the point blank killings of three innocent PhD scientists even more disheartening?

By Kevin Eason
Kevin Eason is a freelance editorial cartoonist and Illustrator from NJ. His brand of satire covers news events in politics, entertainment, sports and much more. Kevin’s work features include: TVOne, NABJ, WBLS_107.5FM, EURweb and various newspapers & magazines throughout the country.

By Jackie Jones
Black folks may be easy marks for online and mail-in gold businesses.