By The Editors
Eunice Johnson, who created the Ebony Fashion Fair in the mid-1950s and built it into a powerful social and financial success, was clairvoyant.

By The Editors
Eunice Johnson, who created the Ebony Fashion Fair in the mid-1950s and built it into a powerful social and financial success, was clairvoyant.

By Stacey Patton
Ugandans don’t like homosexuals.

That simple phrase is a gross understatement to the country’s 500,000 gays and lesbians living in the heavily Muslim and Christian nation of 30 million, where 95% of the population opposes legalizing homosexual acts. The Ugandan parliament is trying to further crack down on the lives of gays and lesbians as it debates a draconian Anti-Homosexuality Bill that would require its citizens to peep behind bedroom doors and tell on people who engage in “unnatural” consensual sex.

By TaRessa Stovall
A group of 60 prominent leaders has released a statement condemning the Cuban regime of Raul Castro for harassing and cracking down on an emerging civil rights movement in the small, controversial Caribbean nation.

By Lee A. Daniels
They were criminals, all 400-plus of them, according to the duly enacted laws of the states of the Old Confederacy – lawbreakers, ‘race mixers,’ and disturbers of the peace.  Government officials and editorialists across the South called them “communists,” “socialists,” and “outside agitators.” They were beaten, with the connivance of the police, by Ku Klux Klan thugs in Alabama. They were jailed in Mississippi, first in the city jail in Jackson, and then, in the notorious Parchman state penitentiary. Their very lives were in danger.

They were the Freedom Riders.

By The Editors
Tom Perez, President Obama’s choice as Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division — the Administration’s point man on civil rights enforcement—formally took office November 13, amid a palpable sense of celebration among civil rights advocates.

By The Editors
“There has never been a year like this past year in America.”

Those were the opening words of the brief speech with which John Payton, President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) welcomed the nearly 800 guests at LDF’s 23rd annual National Equal Justice Awards Dinner in New York on November 4; and that straightforward declarative sentence indeed seemed to capture an entire twelve months’ sense of excitement—and determination—that permeated the buoyant gathering.

By Stacey Patton
I had a chance to steal a few moments with former NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF) President and Director-counsel Theodore M. Shaw after the September 18 symposium on the Supreme Court’s case selection process held at the National Press Club in Washington, DC.

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.