By The Editors
On December 16, the LDF launched Count on Change 2010, a strategic, collaborative, national public education campaign designed to substantially improve the inclusion of the Black Diaspora in the 2010 Census.

“The 2000 Census overlooked 1 million people of color, more than 600,000 of whom were African American,” said John Payton, Director Counsel and President of LDF.

By TaRessa Stovall
On December 1, in a contest described in the media as “one of the tightest political contests in decades,” 30 percent of Atlanta voters elected Reed, 40, as the city’s sixth consecutive African-American mayor since the late Maynard Jackson made history as the first African-American to lead a major Southern city in 1973.

By Rev. Susan Newman
One of the best lessons my mother taught me as a child is “It is better to have it and not need it, than to need it and not have it.” This is how I feel about the looming threat of abortion restrictions being reintroduced in the Health Care Reform bill when debate begins on the Senate floor.

By Mark Lassiter
On Tuesday, December 1, a potentially historic mayoral election will take place in Atlanta, Georgia. The November 3 election led to a runoff between City Councilor Mary Norwood, a white woman running as an Independent, though some say she’s Republican; and Georgia State Senator Kasim Reed, a Democrat who has the support of both the local hip-hop stars and the old-school civil rights veterans.

By The Editors
After nearly a month of wrangling, on Thursday the U.S. Senate shelved an eleventh-hour attempt to add a new question—about citizenship and immigration status—to next year’s Census population survey.

By Lee A. Daniels
I want to thank two people in the trans-Atlantic Anglo-American community—Rush Limbaugh here in the U.S., and Nick Griffin, head of Britain’s major white-supremacist party—for their bracing directness.

By Doug Miller
Opposition to an eleventh-hour change in a Census Bureau funding bill is building. Minority legislators and a widening array of civil rights advocacy groups have voiced concerns that a proposed amendment by U.S. Senators David Vitter (R-LA) and Robert Bennett (R-UT) will have a chilling effect on Census participation and unnecessarily add hundreds of millions of dollars to the process.

By Stacey Patton
The Supreme Court’s function is to solve important questions of the law by resolving cases and controversies. So what happens when it decides to hear fewer cases? And what happens when the Court hears even fewer cases on civil rights claims?

By The Editors
Most Americans undoubtedly consider America’s Constitution, that set of principles and regulations set down by the Founding Fathers in Philadelphia in 1787, as essentially a static document. It was, after all, the foundation of the nation.
But that’s “a mistaken notion,” John Payton, President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, told a rapt audience of students, faculty and others September 16 at the Constitution Day convocation of Oberlin College.

By Lee A. Daniels
Writing with an easy command of a mountain of material that encompasses six decades of enormous changes in America, Sullivan shows how critical the NAACP, now celebrating its centennial, was to the Civil Rights Movement’s ultimate legal and legislative victories that made the United States a democracy in fact not just in rhetoric.