By Kenneth J. Cooper
Tennessee State University, a historically black school in Nashville, has devised a program to improve math instruction in the state’s K-8 schools that could help narrow gaps in student achievement and college completion rates.

By George E. Curry
Ray Charles sings about Georgia being on his mind. But, as Troy Davis is to be laid to rest Saturday in Savannah, Georgia is also on the minds of distraught death penalty opponents who saw him executed on the basis of questionable evidence and despite an array of witnesses who had recanted their original testimony.

By Lee A. Daniels
The New York Times reported yesterday that Mark Melvin, a prison inmate in Alabama, is suing the state department of corrections because they won’t let him have a book his attorney sent him. His lawsuit charges that prison officials characterized the book as “a security threat,” as “too incendiary” and “too provocative.”

By Lee A. Daniels
The equality-loving – so they say – College Republican club at the University of California at Berkeley yesterday held what they described as a satirical “bake sale” on the storied campus to publicize their opposition to any change in 15-year-old ban against state institutions adopting affirmative action policies.

Editor’s Note: In the early 1990s conservative critics of the inclusion of more than token numbers of black students at selective colleges tried a new tack. They rallied round the assertion made by Harvey C. Mansfield, a professor of government at Harvard University, that the admission of larger number of black students at Harvard in the 1960s produced the grade inflation that liberals and conservatives alike agreed had become widespread throughout higher education. One of the keenest analyses disproving Mansfield’s claim was written by Theodore L. Cross, founder and editor of The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education.

By Kenneth J. Cooper
Emerson went on a spree of hirings and promotions of minorities, capped by the installation in July of its first African-American president, M. Lee Pelton, former president of Willamette University in Oregon.

On Wednesday, for the second time, a federal court in Washington, D.C. upheld the constitutionality of the heart of the 2006 reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act.

A ruling last year on Farrakhan v. Locke by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed earlier court rulings and set forth a new, nearly insurmountable standard for lawsuits attacking felon disfranchisement policies.

Ryan P. Haygood, Director of the Political Participation Group of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, explored the implications of the court’s ruling in a recent issue of the Columbia Law Review.

By The Editors
The Census Bureau’s annual report on the status of Americans’ income, the number of Americans living in poverty, and the number of Americans without health insurance that was released last week did double duty.

By George E. Curry
Facing the worst polling numbers of his administration, an increasingly alienated Democratic base and rigidly uncooperative Republicans, President Obama has junked his Compromiser-in-Chief approach and started calling out members of the GOP who oppose adopting programs that will help revive the economy.