By Matt Cregor & Damon Hewitt
Our nation’s school discipline rates have reached all-time highs. As suspension, expulsion and school-based arrests rates grow, racial disparities in discipline continue to widen.

By Seth DiStefano
It’s not often that building a new prison might represent a watershed moment in criminal justice reform. But in New Orleans, Louisiana, that’s exactly what is happening.

By George E. Curry
There they go again. First, conservatives ranging from anti-affirmative action foe Ward Connerly, to combative talk show host Glenn Beck, claimed to be acting in the spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as they sought to dismantle everything he fought for. Now, one of Reagan’s sons has made the outlandish assertion that Reagan was a better friend of African-Americans than the nation’s first black president.

By Lee A. Daniels
Here’s a suggestion: Whenever you hear or read someone boasting of “American exceptionalism,” — the notion that America has since its founding been uniquely ordained by God and its own moral character to lead the world – reach for your wallet. Because, intellectually speaking, someone is surely trying to pick your pocket.

By The Editors
For nearly two decades now, it’s been clear that the once-exalted reputation of Jon Burge, a former Chicago senior police official, was not deserved. That was confirmed last June by a federal jury’s decision to convict him of two counts of obstruction of justice and one count of perjury for lying in a civil suit brought against him.

By TaRessa Stovall
On January 17, a sophisticated bomb with a remote detonator was discovered on the route of the Martin Luther King Day Parade in Spokane, Washington about an hour before hundreds of residents were set to march past in the spirit of justice, equality and nonviolence. The FBI described the incident as “domestic terrorism.”

By Lee A. Daniels
Mark Twain would be pleased, wouldn’t he?

The heated reaction to the publishing of a new edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with the word “nigger” changed to “slave” continues unabated in the mainstream media and the blogosphere.

Between 1989 and 1990, six innocent people were sentenced to a combined 120 years in prison for the rape and murder of a sixty-eight year old woman in Beatrice, Nebraska. The six co-defendants, three women and three men, came to be called the Beatrice Six, after the town where the crime happened.

Black married-couple families are 41 percent more likely to be headed by a parent who has a college education than are single-parent black families. For both blacks and whites, large families are less likely than smaller families to have a head who went to college.

By The Editors
A panel of leaders who’ve worked to foster greater diversity told a public forum in Charlotte, North Carolina Thursday evening it was imperative that Americans regain their courage, their sense of community, and their faith that the country does have enough room, resources and opportunity for all.