The ACLU, NAACP and NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) announced today that they oppose the Michigan Attorney General’s request to convene a special 16-judge panel to reconsider the court’s decision this month striking down Michigan’s Proposal 2.  The attorney general expressed his plans to request a rehearing by the full court of appeals today.

By The Editors
As Norway reels, decent people across the globe are again left to ponder the same horrible question that has haunted human society for the last century: What drives sane human beings to believe their ideology justifies mass murder?

By Lee A. Daniels
Imagine, in the heart of Dixie, once the land of cotton, where, to some whites, the old times of white-over-black dominion are not only not forgotten but wistfully remembered, there’s a park that’s a memorial to treason.

By Kenneth J. Cooper
Enmeshed in a tangled, longstanding dispute over their citizenship rights, descendants of the Cherokee Freedmen, the former slaves of the Oklahoma-based Native American tribe, are pinning their hopes of healing a public rupture with the Cherokee Nation on a new election for chief.

By Doug Miller
In the largest civil penalty it has ever issued, the Federal Reserve fined Wells Fargo & Co. $85 million to settle allegations that the San Francisco-based bank maneuvered borrowers into taking out costlier subprime home loans and falsified information on mortgage applications.

Almost all black colleges and universities are not in compliance with rules stipulating that women have equal opportunities for athletic participation in college. In many cases, the black colleges are way out of line with federal regulations.

By Tarice L.S. Gray
Black people in America have had a long-standing love affair with the arts.  When black people in this country were enslaved, laws restricted them from doing much of anything, but they could always sing. Music proved to be more than a lifeline.  Portia Maultsby, Laura Boulten Professor of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University, believes that blacks have always used music “as a centerpiece of [their] social and cultural practices.”  It was and remains a way to affirm their African-American identity and be a spiritual bulwark against oppression.

By Lee A. Daniels
His brothers’ keeper; His sisters’ keeper.
Those words came floating into my mind early Monday morning as I contemplated the fact that Nelson Mandela had reached his ninety-third birthday – and had sent word to his millions of admirers around the world that the best way to celebrate his longevity was for each of us to devote 67 minutes yesterday to community service.

Today, the Council of State Governments released a new report that helps to raise awareness about the importance of dismantling the School-to-Prison Pipeline.  Entitled Breaking Schools’ Rules: A Statewide Study of How School Discipline Relates to Students’ Success and Juvenile Justice Involvement, the report is the most in-depth of its kind, examining the academic, disciplinary, and juvenile court records of nearly a million Texas secondary school students.  Sadly, it confirms the national trend that LDF has observed in its Dismantling the School-to-Prison Pipeline initiative:  educational inequity, excessive reliance upon harsh disciplinary practices, and extreme racial disparities in both.

By The Editors
Federal prosecutors are expected to call their final witness Monday in the explosive trial in New Orleans whose purpose is to apply a measure of justice to one of the most notorious incidents that wracked the city in the wake of Hurricane Katrina: the Danizger Bridge police shooting.