By Kenneth J. Cooper
As a Georgia congressman, Newt Gingrich was no friend of civil rights. He voted against civil rights bills and mouthed the inflammatory arguments of conservative opponents of black progress.

By Tarice L.S. Gray
Eighty percent of fourth-graders, 83 percent of eighth-graders, and a truly astonishing 86 percent of high school seniors failed to show a “proficient” knowledge and understanding of the nation’s history – or rather, that they knew and understood the subject matter.

By Lee A. Daniels
New Mexico’s new Republican Governor Susana Martinez has drawn significant national attention not only because she’s the first Latinato hold that high office in the U.S., but also because she’s pushed a hard-line against undocumented immigrants—most of whom, of course, are from Latin America.

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 The Editors
Why did Norman Redlich, Clara Luper, and Paul E. Sullivan act as if the words of the Declaration of Independence about “self-evident truths” and “inalienable rights” were not just rhetoric but had an actual meaning for American society?

By Tomiko Brown-Nagin
Many of those who profess to want change “don’t care nothing about poor people … If they had poor people at heart, they could make it better.” Ethel Mae Mathews, president of the Atlanta chapter of the National Welfare Rights Organization, made this statement in 2000, after decades of community-based activism in Atlanta.

By Kenneth J. Cooper
“Freedom Riders” is a well-documented ride through history, back 50 years into another century, when America seemed like a different place. It is no joy ride.

By George E. Curry
Whatever you plan to do next Monday night (May 16), make sure you are home in front of the television or have set your recorder to tape Freedom Riders, the excellent PBS documentary by filmmaker Stanley Nelson. And make sure children, related or unrelated, watch the documentary with you

By TaRessa Stovall
May 1961: Between May and December , 436 black and white civil rights activists, many of them students, known as Freedom Riders rode more than 60 bus rides to fight segregated travel facilities in the South and raise the nation’s consciousness about racial injustice.

The Civil War began in 1861. It didn’t end until 1965. By Lee A. Daniels “Why We’re Still Fighting the Civil War,” the cover of the April 18 issue of Time Magazine declared, marking the 150th anniversary of the shelling of Fort Sumter that began the conflagration. Time’s editors then posted an additional, poignant comment: [...]