By Kenneth J. Cooper
This June Denver, with a population that is 10 percent black, elected its second African American mayor – one more than its more populous brethren, New York, Los Angeles or Chicago, have produced.

By The Editors
Some New York State legislators want to roll back democracy by reinstituting prison-based gerrymandering.

By The Editors
President Obama Friday quickly signed legislation the House of Representatives had passed at midnight Thursday authorizing more than $800 billion in tax cuts and extending unemployment benefits to millions of jobless workers for the next 13 months.

By The Editors
The Senate appeared ready Tuesday to pass the controversial compromise tax plan fashioned by President Obama and Congressional Republicans, legislation that would also extend unemployment benefits to millions of jobless workers to the end of 2011.

By Lee A. Daniels
“You won’t have Nixon to kick around any more, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference …”
If only Richard Nixon had kept the bitter promise he spat out to reporters the day after losing the California gubernatorial election in November, 1962.

By The Editors
The Senate Thursday tabled legislation that would provide a clear route to citizenship for high school and college students in the U.S. illegally, raising the possibility that the push to pass it has failed.

Yesterday the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF) filed a brief in Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder, a case challenging the constitutionality of two core provisions of the Voting Rights Act. The law requires jurisdictions with a history of discrimination to have voting changes reviewed by the U.S. Department of Justice or D.C. District Court to ensure they are free from discrimination.

By Dale Ho
“Prison-based gerrymandering” is a practice whereby many states and local governments count incarcerated persons as residents of the areas where they are housed when election district lines are drawn. This practice distorts our democratic process by artificially inflating the population count-and thus, the political influence-of the districts where prisons and jails are located.

According to a new publication issued this week by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF), the increased concern about the mass incarceration of African Americans in the nation’s state and federal prisons has exposed a concomitant insidious practice: prison-based gerrymandering.

By Lee A. Daniels
Is it congenital?
Is the Republican Party so institutionally infected with anti-black and anti-Latino hostility that it can’t help doing things which make a mockery of its glib rhetoric about appealing to people of color?