By John Payton
John Payton, President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., was invited to speak this week on the state of elementary and secondary education at the Centennial Conference of the National Urban League. He followed to the podium Arne Duncan, the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Education. Both were introduced by Marc Morial, the President and CEO of the Urban League.

By Lee A. Daniels A federal judge this week blocked the central and most controversial provisions of Arizona’s newly-enacted immigration law that took effect Thursday, declaring they improperly interfered with federal immigration enforcement law. But while the judge’s ruling cheered opponents of the law, which included the federal Department of Justice, it represented only the [...]

The funding formula used to provide grants to New Orleans residents whose homes were damaged or destroyed by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita very likely disadvantaged black homeowners because it was based on depressed property values that result from both current racial isolation and the city’s segregated past, a U.S. District Court judge has indicated. As [...]

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 The Editors
State officials expressed hope that a new agreement giving oversight of four of New York’s most dangerous youth prisons will mark the start of significant reforms of the widely-condemned system.

By TaRessa Stovall
A trio of new products designed to protect against rape and STDs, especially HIV/AIDS, raises questions about the gaps and conflicts between scientific progress, lifestyle logistics and human nature. These recent developments also call into question the age-old role of Black bodies as test sites for potential progress.

By Stacey Patton
Since Louisiana has the highest rate of incarceration of any state in the country  –  of which 79 percent of its 39,000 inmates are black – it ’s no surprise to hear that BP is using prison labor to clean up the largest oil spill ever in U.S. history.

Larry Johnson spent over 18 years in a Missouri prisons for a rape he did not commit. The victim described a clean-shaven African American male, but identified Johnson at a lineup, even though he had a mustache. He was convicted in 1984 based largely on the cross-racial identification. In more than half of wrongful convictions involving eyewitness misidentification, the eyewitness and defendant were of different races.

Johnson first contacted the Innocence Project in 1995, but it took six more years, and repeated motions, before a Missouri court allowed DNA testing on the remaining biological evidence. The results conclusively excluded Johnson as the perpetrator, and he was officially exonerated eight years ago this week.

By Lee A. Daniels
The racist fable that Andrew Breitbart and that loose clique of conservative confederates in the media tried to spin about Shirley Sherrod underscore a point historian Barbara W. Tuchman made years ago about the ethics of her profession.

“Leaving things out because they do not fit,” she wrote in her 1982 book, Practicing History: Selected Essays, “is writing fiction, not history.”

By Khalil Gibran Muhammad
In the wake of Oakland transit cop Johannes Mesherle’s recent involuntary manslaughter conviction for the on-duty shooting death of unarmed, 22 year-old Oscar Grant, the injury of his death and so many black men before him is as raw and bloody now as it was the day they were killed.