By Stacey Patton
August 28th marks the 55th anniversary of the brutal murder of 14 year-old Emmett Louis Till. In the summer of 1955 he was forced out of his bed in the middle of the night at gunpoint by white men, thrown on the back of a pick-up truck and driven to a barn [...]

By Lee A. Daniels
The racist fable that Andrew Breitbart and that loose clique of conservative confederates in the media tried to spin about Shirley Sherrod underscore a point historian Barbara W. Tuchman made years ago about the ethics of her profession.

“Leaving things out because they do not fit,” she wrote in her 1982 book, Practicing History: Selected Essays, “is writing fiction, not history.”

By Nicole Mason
The trouble with Shirley Sherrod is that she told the truth. In a small town speech before an even smaller NAACP chapter, she grappled publicly with the discomfort of what happens when power and decisions that can impact the lives of ordinary Americans are in the hands of individuals who have traditionally been shut off from power or not had access to resources.

By Stacey Patton
Now, as the country braces for the possibility of a double-dip recession, additional spells of unemployment, and yet another wave of home foreclosures, a recent report by the New York Times found that the bulk of those dumping their mortgages are rich people.

They call it “strategic defaults.”

By Tarice L.S. Gray
The lack of opportunity makes the internet all the more enticing as a content producing platform. An artist can initiate their own opportunity and control their own image.

By Maggie Astor
While the brunt of public fury has rightly fallen on BP, quite a bit of blame has been pinned on President Obama as well. This is not entirely surprising, given the time-honored American tradition of blaming the federal government for almost everything. But we could do with a more levelheaded look not only at what Obama can realistically accomplish here, but also at where he fits in the long history of presidential responses to environmental disasters.

By TaRessa Stovall
Thanks to changing laws, there may soon be fewer videos of police actions to post online or contribute to television news stories. The blog Gizmodo.com, reports that, “in at least three states, it is now illegal to record any on-duty police officer … even if the encounter involves you and may be necessary to your defense, and even if the recording is on a public street where no expectation of privacy exists.”

By Stacey Patton
When I finished the full story, I came to the surprising conclusion that this latest interaction between a white teacher and black child’s hair just might not be a racist incident after all.

By Janet Singleton
“If you want to honor her, tell a story,” Keisha Washington told a Denver Post reporter about her aunt, storyteller Opalanga Pugh. For a quarter of a century, as a traditional Griot, she built her life on stories. Written about in publications like the Wall Street Journal and Christian Science Monitor and dubbed a “living legend” by an NBC show, Pugh was among only about 300 people in America who make their livings as fulltime storytellers, according the International Storytelling Center in Jonesborough, Tennessee.

By Lee A. Daniels
Why is there so much focus on the “heroism” of Atticus Finch in confronting the racism of the town’s (and region’s) legal system and so little discussion of the fact that he lost.