By Tarice L.S. Gray
Tracking in public schools began innocently enough in the 1920s in this country, an era when many high school students took jobs right after graduating and relatively few went to college. Education experts and school officials reasoned it was more practical to establish different curricula, or “tracks” that would prepare students for their likely future. But in the decades since, including those since the Brown decision, tracking too often morphed from scholastic sorting to racial discrimination.

John  Hithon believed his supervisor’s failure to promote him resulted from racial prejudice and filed an employment discrimination claim against Tyson Foods, Inc. in 1996. Part of the evidence backing Hithon’s claim was testimony confirming his white boss’s habit of referring to him, an African-American man, using the derogatory term “boy.”

By Lee A. Daniels
These are dark-skinned people, not … like you and me.”

There you have it. Brief and to the point. The words sound so familiar, so American.

But they weren’t spoken by an American.

By The Editors
African-American and Native American farmers, who’ve endured decades of discrimination from the federal government, rallied in Washington this week in an effort to get the Senate to finally approve payout of the billions of dollars they were awarded through the settlement of lawsuits nearly a decade

By Doug Miller
Two subsidiaries of American International Group Inc. (AIG), the “ too big to fail” insurer that received one of the biggest slices of the federal financial services bailout, will pay more than $6 million to settle allegations that they discriminated against African Americans by charging them higher fees for mortgages transacted during a period from 2003 to 2006.

By Tananarive Due
Fifty years ago, my mother, Dr. Patricia Stephens Due, and my aunt, Priscilla Stephens Kruize, were among five Florida A&M University students who spent 49 days in jail after being arrested for ordering food at a Tallahassee Woolworth lunch counter—the first “jail-in” in the fledgling civil rights movement of the 1960s.

By Lee A. Daniels
In 1865, the North’s victory in the Civil War freed black Americans from slavery.

But it did not free them from cotton.

By Christina Swarns
On March 5, 2008, LDF filed a “friend of the court” brief  asking the United States Supreme Court to review the jury selection process in the controversial 1982 trial of Mumia Abu-Jamal. This brief urges the Supreme Court to enforce the existing laws that require courts to promptly investigate “inferences” of racial discrimination and ensure that the criminal justice system maintains its own integrity, provides a fair trial for the accused, and protects prospective jurors of color from discrimination.