By Leslie Proll
When President Obama took office last January, hopes were high that the right wing’s long stronghold on the federal courts had come to an end. LDF and other civil rights advocates were eager for a new day when fair and impartial judges would once again be nominated and confirmed in large numbers.

By Lee A. Daniels
Will they or won’t they?

That question about the black vote—about whether black voters would show up at the polls on election day—hung over the bitter final months of last year’s presidential campaign like a looming thunder cloud.

The answer was resounding, of course, and now, thanks to recent reports by the Census Bureau and the Pew Research Center and the Pew Hispanic Center, we have a wealth of data to quantify just how historic for black America and America November 4, 2008 was.

By Dr. David Levering-Lewis
Pulitzer Prize Winning biographer of W.E.B. Du Bois examines the “Zeitgeist phenomenon” of Barack Obama’s victory through the prisms of global events, the dilemmas of color and nationality, and catastrophic events impacting the election.

By Alexis Karteron: There has been widespread speculation about President-Elect Barack Obama’s campaign and election heralding a “post-racial” America. In conversations across the nation and such headlines as “Obama, Racial Barrier Falls in Heavy Turnout,” (The New York Times) and “Obama’s Post-Racial Promise,” (Los Angeles Times) following the election, some seemed eager to believe that [...]

By William I. Dawson: Like everything else in life, the singular moment of the month just past comes back to music. It’s been equal parts melody and harmony, a sweet-sounding pitch, undeniable power and a ridiculous pace. It’s been the perfect verse over a tight beat. Indeed, the election of Barack Hussein Obama, the first-ever [...]

By Joye Brown: Michael Higgins didn’t go the polls alone on Election Day. Like many others in this historic presidential election, Higgins traveled to a neighborhood elementary school last Tuesday with wife, Bernadette, son, Jabari, 3, and daughter, Ayanna, 8, to cast his vote. Higgins carried three photographs behind the curtain and into the voting [...]