By John Payton
I realize when I say we’re a very racially diverse democracy, sometimes I say it in a way that makes it sound like a triumph; in fact, it’s a challenge.

By Khalil Gibran Muhammad
In the coming weeks, as Chicago officials extend handgun rights to its citizens in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision, and politicians debate whether or not urban residents will be better protected by armed soldiers, important lessons from the past should not go unheeded.

By Lee A. Daniels
A teachable moment on America’s racial past and present is occurring at the University of Texas at Austin because of the exposure of the dirty history of one of its early twentieth-century professors: his membership in the Ku Klux Klan.

By Lee A. Daniels
Thursday the U.S. Senate refused to pass legislation extending unemployment benefits for jobless workers coming to the end of their regular benefits period. As a result, by the end of next week, more than a million jobless Americans will have lost their benefits this month.

By Tarice L.S. Gray
On February 23, 2010 at the Director’s Guild of America, Academy Award-nominated actress Taraji P. Henson spoke eloquently about Bill Duke, one of the people she wanted to thank for her Oscar-worthy performance in the film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Duke, the esteemed actor/director, who acted in such films as Predator and directed such hits as Sister Act II, was being honored that evening for his work as an artist and humanitarian.

By Stacey Patton
It was early November 2009. Steve, my biological father, was going to be dead before the end of the month. I was 420 miles away, bracing for his impending death and grieving. Not for him. But for the death of all my hopes, dreams and fantasies of what could have been.

By Lee A. Daniels
The Arizona politicos who produced that state’s SB1070 law – the racial profiling bill – as their answer to the country’s confused immigration procedures now want to deny U.S. citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants born in the state.

By Lee A. Daniels
I’m a great believer in surveys. They’re a great way to take an accurate measurement of popular sentiment. But I learned a long time ago that the popular sentiment isn’t always morally correct.

By Eisa Nefertari Ulen
The Harlem Renaissance Remembered is an innovative compilation of poetry, sound, and substance. Featuring Jonathan Gross, Ph.D., a Professor of English at DePaul University, and musician “Mack” Jay Jordan, who played with Ramsey Lewis and Nat King Cole during a decades-long career that took him around the world, this CD will appeal to jazz enthusiasts and educators, poets and poetry lovers, avid readers and admirers of all things Renaissance.

By The Editors
Early in “Thurgood,” the one-man play about Thurgood Marshall starring Laurence Fishburne now at Washington’s famed John F. Kennedy Center, Marshall recalls that during one of his first nights as an undergraduate at Pennsylvania’s historically black Lincoln University, he and several friends had a minor encounter in the nearby town with the kind of petty racism that was pervasive everywhere in America.