By Lee A. Daniels
Those eight months in 1968 – when apocalyptic pronouncements about the nation’s imminent crack-up did not seem so far-fetched – are my personal touchstone whenever I hear or read someone bemoaning our distance from that mythical mirage, the Promised Land, or the continuing sharpness of “the racial divide,” speaking generally, between blacks and whites.

By Kenneth J. Cooper
“On Gold Mountain” resembles a Chinese “Roots,” a 100-year-old saga of an immigrant family’s rise from peasantry in their homeland to prosperity in America. I got a cultural education about the rituals, customs and languages brought from China, but found most revealing the passages about the family’s interactions with this country’s laws.

By The Editors
Five former New Orleans police officers were sentenced Wednesday in federal court to prison terms of up to 65 years for their roles in perpetrating and then trying to cover up the truth of the infamous Danziger Bridge shooting incident nearly seven years ago that left two innocent civilians dead and four others seriously wounded.

by Tarice L.S. Gray
In February that disconnect between educator and student was cast into sharp relief by the controversy which enveloped Jada Williams, a 13-year-old black student in Rochester, New York. Jada’s English class assignment was to study the Narrative Life of Frederick Douglass, and draw comparisons between Douglass’ struggle to overcome the ban against slaves becoming literate and the educational obstacles black youth face today.

Blacks are making slow progress in overall faculty ranks at American colleges and universities. But they still have almost no presence on the science faculties at universities engaged in the most scientific research.

On Friday, the South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP and individual Black college students moved to join a lawsuit to prevent the implementation of South Carolina’s discriminatory voting law.

By Debo Adegbile
John Payton, who died on March 22 at the age of 65, had an infectious optimism and confidence that made all good things not simply possible but probable. As the leader of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Inc., John reset the odds in the fight for equality.

Earlier this month news reports indicated that the papers of Richard T. Greener, the first African-American graduate of Harvard, had been discovered in a ramshackle abandoned house in Chicago, where he died in 1922.

Greener had graduated from Harvard in 1870, beginning the tradition of black Americans matriculating at elite white colleges in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states. For nearly a century after Greener, black students at these schools were few in number and subjected to discrimination in and out of the classroom. One of the most visible and controversial episodes of this occurred in the early 1920s and came to be known as the Harvard Housing Crisis. It should be noted that the 1920s were also the decade when limitations on the admission of white-ethnic Americans began to be applied at Harvard and other elite colleges more vigorously.

By Kenneth J. Cooper
Martin’s tragic death should shock fair-minded people everywhere and should prompt this country to hold up a mirror and take a long look at the dangerous perception problem lurking in the minds of too many white Americans, including some officers of the law sworn to “serve and protect.”

By George E. Curry
Republicans are so intent on defeating President Barack Obama in November that they have accused him of deliberately raising the price of gasoline.