By Eisa Nefertari Ulen
Damon Wayans, the second-eldest son in one of Black Hollywood’s most successful family dynasties has written the perfect summer beach read novel with surprising insights into and empathy for a demographic very different than his own.

By Janet Singleton
African Americans show great empathy for other blacks in pain, says a study from Northwestern University. Whites, by comparison, showed less compassion for pain-stricken Caucasians.

By Doug Miller
After seventh-grade algebra students were exposed to one of math teacher D.J. Duey’s original rap songs on point plotting, their test scores showed a marked improvement.

By Stacey Patton
This week LDF won another significant victory in the Supreme Court. In Lewis v. Chicago, the Court ruled unanimously that the City of Chicago can be held responsible for each time it used a hiring practice that arbitrarily blocked qualified black applicants from employment.

In April Justice Stephen G. Breyer of the U.S. Supreme Court spoke at the New York Historical Society about the historical and present-day importance of the infamous Dred Scott decision, which played a critical role in bringing about the Civil War. We cannot think of a more fitting momemt to contemplate Justice Breyer’s words than on Memorial Day, which began in 1868 in the North as a day to pay homage to the Civil War dead.

Four years ago this week, Orlando Boquete was officially exonerated of a sexual assault he did not commit. After a woman was attacked in her Florida Keys apartment in 1982, she described one of the attackers as a shirtless, bald Latino man. Shortly after the rape, Boquete was seen at a convenience store in the area. He was bald and shirtless, but also had a mustache. The victim identified Boquete from the police car twenty feet away, changing her initial description of the rapist to include the mustache. Biological evidence that should have excluded Boquete was misrepresented at trial, and he was convicted and sentenced to 50 years in prison.

With the help of the Innocence Project, Boquete obtained DNA testing on semen stains on the victim’s clothing in late 2005. The results excluded him, and he was set free in 2006.

By Lee A. Daniels
Paul revealed – again — that when it comes to protecting citizens from discrimination, libertarianism favors a policy of governmental benign neglect that would leave the targets of discrimination stranded in a vast, turbulent sea of injustice.

After years fighting for justice, qualified African-American job applicants will finally have a fair opportunity to land a job with the Chicago fire department. Today the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the City of Chicago can be held accountable for each and every time it used a hiring practice that arbitrarily blocked qualified minority applicants from employment.

By The Editors
It is the greatest regularly-scheduled publication devoted to black Americans’ concerns ever published.

We’re referring, of course, to The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, the quarterly compendium of news, statistics, and opinion on the experience of blacks in higher education founded seventeen years ago by the late Theodore Lamont Cross.

By Eric V. Copage
One way to create a black canon, I thought, would be to ask accomplished black artists and thinkers which black cultural gem most inspired them, and their personal story of why.

The first person I thought to ask was Nikki Giovanni.