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.

In April Justice Stephen G. Breyer of the U.S. Supreme Court spoke at the New York Historical Society about the historical and present-day importance of the infamous Dred Scott decision, which played a critical role in bringing about the Civil War. We cannot think of a more fitting momemt to contemplate Justice Breyer’s words than on Memorial Day, which began in 1868 in the North as a day to pay homage to the Civil War dead.

By Lee A. Daniels
Paul revealed – again — that when it comes to protecting citizens from discrimination, libertarianism favors a policy of governmental benign neglect that would leave the targets of discrimination stranded in a vast, turbulent sea of injustice.

By Vernon E. Jordan, Jr.
In New York State Thurgood Marshall Day –appropriately — also marks the anniversary of a great American milestone.

The United States Supreme Court declared that children convicted of non-homicide offenses cannot be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The Court concluded that because adolescents are, by nature, less culpable than adults and because life without parole is an extreme sentence which is rarely imposed on teenagers, it is cruel and unusual punishment to sentence a child who has not killed to life without possibility of parole

By George E. Curry
As the nation was mourning the deaths of civil rights icons Benjamin L. Hooks and Dorothy Irene Height, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s organization, was trying to resolve a nasty split in its leadership ranks that involves allegations of ethical and criminal misconduct.

By TaRessa Stovall
Who will pick up the baton?

When civil rights pioneers Drs. Benjamin Hooks and Dorothy Height passed away in mid-April, the question ricocheted through cyberspace, amid tributes to the pair of visionary legends as stalwarts of a movement that created the America we know today.

It always seemed that Dorothy Irene Height, who died today at 98, was present at the creation of black Americans’ twentieth-century struggle for freedom and equality. That was because within the living memory of most Americans Dr. Height was in fact at the center of that multi-faceted struggle that began with the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the National Urban League a century ago and continues today.

By Gregory Zlotnick
50 years after a group of students gathered at Shaw University and formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, activists and leaders returned to Raleigh, North Carolina this past weekend to commemorate the organization’s golden anniversary.

By George E. Curry
Brave activists who formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the group’s founding Thursday through Sunday in Raleigh, N.C.

When they return to the city of their birth, they will undoubtedly regale one another with tales from the civil rights battlefields. They will recount the many times SNCC workers came frighteningly close to being murdered while living in the homes of local residents and existing on $10-a-week salaries.