By Theodore M. Shaw
He brought an energy and commitment to his work that was rooted in his unabashed commitment to improving the lives of African-American people.

By The Editors
Like many, perhaps most of the awardees of the Congressional Medal of Honor, Vernon Baker lived the life of an ordinary individual both before and after those moments when service to his country and the cause of freedom demanded an extraordinary jettisoning of regard for his own life.

By William L. Taylor
I have had the good fortune to be a participant, not just a spectator, in the enormous social transformations of American life that occurred during the last half of the twentieth century. I see the changes in my everyday life and in the status of people of color, women, and people with disabilities.

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 David N. Dinkins
Evelyn Elizabeth Long Cunningham has left us with so much more than memories – she has left us a rich legacy of her strength, a legacy of her warmth and charm, and a legacy of the great gift of her courage.

By TaRessa Stovall
When news of Lena Horne’s passing on May 9 zoomed through cyberspace and other news media, I found myself most warmed and inspired by a varied bouquet of tributes from people of different generations whose lives she touched in many ways.

By TaRessa Stovall
Who will pick up the baton?

When civil rights pioneers Drs. Benjamin Hooks and Dorothy Height passed away in mid-April, the question ricocheted through cyberspace, amid tributes to the pair of visionary legends as stalwarts of a movement that created the America we know today.

It always seemed that Dorothy Irene Height, who died today at 98, was present at the creation of black Americans’ twentieth-century struggle for freedom and equality. That was because within the living memory of most Americans Dr. Height was in fact at the center of that multi-faceted struggle that began with the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the National Urban League a century ago and continues today.

In one sense, Benjamin L. Hooks, the former Executive Director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, who died today at 85, was a spectacular example of successes of the twentieth-century African-American freedom struggle.

By Lee A. Daniels
He had worked on the White House household staff for 34 years – through the presidencies of Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter, before retiring as White House maitre d’, the top butler’s position, two-thirds of the way through the administration of Ronald Reagan.