By Tarice L. S. Gray
In 2011, there were nearly 3 million breast cancer survivors in this country. Dee Dee Ricks is one of them. She’s the subject the HBO documentary “The Education of Dee Dee Ricks” which walks us through her treatment and charges that the health care system doesn’t play fair.

By Lee A. Daniels
The New York Times reported yesterday that Mark Melvin, a prison inmate in Alabama, is suing the state department of corrections because they won’t let him have a book his attorney sent him. His lawsuit charges that prison officials characterized the book as “a security threat,” as “too incendiary” and “too provocative.”

By Vern E. Smith
At the final curtain call of another sold-out performance of “The Green Book,” Atlanta playwright Calvin Alexander Ramsey’s moving two-act drama set in America before the dawn of the Civil Rights Movement, veteran Atlanta actor Rob Cleveland, who plays its central character, told the well-integrated Balzer Theater audience: “None of us had ever heard of this book before we started the play.”

By Lee A. Daniels When is a painting not just a painting – but a mirror? That’s the question which leaps out of the current controversy over a painting that President Obama secured to hang in a well-trafficked corridor outside the Oval Office that first appeared forty-seven years ago in one of the most widely-read [...]

By Lee A. Daniels
Warning to all who intend to follow the 2012 presidential election: better have a sturdy pair of hip waders handy, because the muck right-wing extremists and fellow-travelers have been shoveling out of the cesspool of American society into the respectable political discourse since President Obama took office is likely to become a deluge.

By The Editors
We couldn’t help but notice the mini-controversy that erupted last week over the depiction on the cover of Newsweek magazine of Republican presidential contender Michele Bachmann.

By Stacey Patton My Dear Sisters, Over the past week or so I’ve read many tweets, Facebook postings, blog rants, and online petitions in response to Psychology Today’s posting of a ‘scientific’ study – “Why Are Black Women Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women” by Satoshi Kanazawa. The reaction to Kanazawa’s armchair psychobabble which was [...]

By TaRessa Stovall
His headline-making announcement that he’d seek the GOP nomination for the 2012 presidential race, distinguished by an obsessive insistence on seeing President Barack Obama’s original birth certificate to establish American citizenship increased the ratings for his NBC reality show, Celebrity Apprentice, and provided rich fodder for pundits and comics alike.

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