By Lee A. Daniels
What Negro Americans faced then was a fierce discrimination that confined them literally and figuratively to a very small corner of American life. Entire categories of jobs, or levels of jobs were off-limits to blacks, and there was virtually no protection for the endemic on-the-job racism those who had jobs endured.

By Tom Fox via The Washington Post
Jacqueline A. Berrien has been the chair of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) since April 2010. A Harvard Law School graduate, Berrien practiced civil rights law for many years, assisted underrepresented groups as a program officer for the Ford Foundation, and came to the EEOC from the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, where she served as associate director-counsel.

By Doug Miller
In the largest civil penalty it has ever issued, the Federal Reserve fined Wells Fargo & Co. $85 million to settle allegations that the San Francisco-based bank maneuvered borrowers into taking out costlier subprime home loans and falsified information on mortgage applications.

By Doug Miller
Facing prosecution by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), national mortgage lender PrimeLending has agreed to pay $2 million to African-American home buyers who the federal agency says were unfairly charged higher interest rates because of their race.

By The Editors
The separate, decades-long odyssey by tens of thousands of black farmers and hundreds of thousands of Native Americans to gain a measure of justice – and compensation – from the federal government is apparently nearing a just conclusion. The Senate last week approved a total of $4.55 billion to settle charges of wrongdoing the groups had brought in separate lawsuits.

The funding formula used to provide grants to New Orleans residents whose homes were damaged or destroyed by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita very likely disadvantaged black homeowners because it was based on depressed property values that result from both current racial isolation and the city’s segregated past, a U.S. District Court judge has indicated. As [...]

By Lee A. Daniels
The so-called digital divide in possession and use of cell phones, laptops and other such devices – which once prompted anguished predictions that black Americans would be left behind on the information superhighway – is fast narrowing.

By The Editors
For more than a decade, the class-action lawsuit involving tens of thousands of the nation’s black farmers on the one side and the federal Department of Agriculture on the other stood as a dramatic symbol of the institutional racism undermining even black Americans involved in one of America’s mythic occupations.

By Doug Miller
Legislation in Congress that would make it easier for workers to form unions is doomed because the Obama administration , with so many other hard contentious issues on its agenda, won’t risk political capital in its defense, according to some experts on trade unionism.

By Khalil Gibran Muhammad
“Education is the key to success. Knowledge is power.” Wise words repeated countless times to young people at home and in school every single day. But what should we say to them if one day their hard work meets empty promises, if their dreams are deferred, or their first paycheck of material reward is marked insufficient funds.