By Lee A. Daniels
I’m a great believer in surveys. They’re a great way to take an accurate measurement of popular sentiment. But I learned a long time ago that the popular sentiment isn’t always morally correct.

By Jill Nelson
As a black woman feminist, more often than not to say in public what I actually think about policy or politics, and particularly to challenge the designated roles black women are assigned in this culture, results in being attacked and dismissed as overbearing, demanding, intimidating, emasculating, or in contemporary, all-inclusive jargon, a hater. The sad truth is that too often black men seem most comfortable when black women in the public sphere are silent, long-suffering, old, or all of the above.

By Janet Singleton
“If you want to honor her, tell a story,” Keisha Washington told a Denver Post reporter about her aunt, storyteller Opalanga Pugh. For a quarter of a century, as a traditional Griot, she built her life on stories. Written about in publications like the Wall Street Journal and Christian Science Monitor and dubbed a “living legend” by an NBC show, Pugh was among only about 300 people in America who make their livings as fulltime storytellers, according the International Storytelling Center in Jonesborough, Tennessee.

Thomas McGowan spent nearly 23 years in a Texas prison after a rape victim identified him in a highly suggestive photo lineup. An African American man was burglarizing a home in Richardson, Texas, when the resident, a young woman, returned. The man beat her severely and threatened the woman with a knife before raping her. After she could not identify anyone at a live lineup the day after the crime, investigators showed her a photographic array ten days later. McGowan, whose photo was in the system solely because of a minor traffic violation, stood out from the others because it was the only one marked “Richardon Police Department” — the city where the crime occurred.

By Eisa Nefertari Ulen
The Harlem Renaissance Remembered is an innovative compilation of poetry, sound, and substance. Featuring Jonathan Gross, Ph.D., a Professor of English at DePaul University, and musician “Mack” Jay Jordan, who played with Ramsey Lewis and Nat King Cole during a decades-long career that took him around the world, this CD will appeal to jazz enthusiasts and educators, poets and poetry lovers, avid readers and admirers of all things Renaissance.

By Lee A. Daniels
Parallel Worlds: The Remarkable Gibbs-Hunts and the Enduring (In)significance of Melanin fleshes out this much-maligned group by focusing on two individuals whose lives as much as any in the small black haute-bourgeoisie that existed from the 1860s to the 1950s embodied the groups’ remarkable status.

By The Editors
Early in “Thurgood,” the one-man play about Thurgood Marshall starring Laurence Fishburne now at Washington’s famed John F. Kennedy Center, Marshall recalls that during one of his first nights as an undergraduate at Pennsylvania’s historically black Lincoln University, he and several friends had a minor encounter in the nearby town with the kind of petty racism that was pervasive everywhere in America.

By Justice David H. Souter
Former Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter recently received a honorary degree from Harvard University, his undergraduate and law school Alma Mater, and delivered the Commencement Address. His speech was a concerted criticism of the conservative judicial doctrine of “originalism,” which contends judicial decisions should be rendered by adhering to a strict reading of the Constitution.

By Lee A. Daniels
Why is there so much focus on the “heroism” of Atticus Finch in confronting the racism of the town’s (and region’s) legal system and so little discussion of the fact that he lost.

By The Editors
Is anyone surprised anymore at the depths Glenn Beck will sink to?

Almost immediately the vicious, mocking tirade he unleashed last week against Malia Obama provoked such a fierce reaction that Beck, no doubt carefully gauging how far beyond the bounds of decency he could venture for long, issued a carefully worded statement that the more credulous have taken for an apology.