By Grace Aneiza Ali
Perhaps it was the sight of Sonia Sanchez, Toni Morrison, Cornel West, Kamau Brathwaite, and Amiri Baraka huddled together around a table at the conference’s awards reception and chatting it up like old pals out on the town for a Saturday night dinner, that was the most memorable. Theirs was a moment of legends.

By The Editors
“These are the lawyers who’ve defined a decade.”

So begins an article in the current issue of the National Law Journal announcing its list of “The Decade’s Most Influential Lawyers.”

Jacqueline Berrien, Associate Director Counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, is being appointed as Chair of the EEOC.

By Jelani Cobb
Moscow’s subways are a thing to behold. Designed to be functional museums, the stations have marble floors, massive stained glass panoramas and epic scale sculpture of revolutionary war heroes. But for several hours yesterday those floors were given over to a less noble task as the dead were pulled from the carnage of the south bound red line train and laid out to be counted and removed.

By John Payton
Tomorrow is Census Day! Be sure both to return your form and encourage your family, friends and neighbors to do the same.

By The Editors
The Power of Numbers: Why Census Data Matter to You

In 1984, Dennis Maher was convicted of three separate rape and sexual assaults committed in Massachusetts the previous year. The Innocence Project took Maher’s case in 1993, and repeatedly tried to gain access to biological evidence, but was told that the evidence could not be located. In 2001, a law student discovered two boxes containing the pants and underwear collected from the rape victim. Testing on the underwear and a second slide located by prosecutors from the Ayer case, excluded Maher as the source of semen. He was officially exonerated this week in 2003. Maher recently wrote an article stressing the need for a comprehensive DNA testing statute in Massachusetts.

By The Editors
Census = Political Power + Civil Rights

By The Editors
You Snooze, You Lose: What Happens When You Ignore Your Census Form.

By C. Nicole Mason Healthcare reform—check. Overhauling America’s economic infrastructure and financial regulatory system—in process. Immigration reform—in the pipeline. Closing the educational achievement gap—working on it. Shuttering Guantanamo Bay—delayed until further review. Ending the war in Iraq and repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell—both on the radar. Obama won election on a reformist platform. His ambitious [...]