By Maynard Eaton
The nation’s top lawman cleared his busy schedule on March 1, to travel to Atlanta to attend the funeral of Jacob Henderson, Jr., a pioneering military attorney during the 1960s who became an expert on international travel and a leading Atlanta businessman.

By Stacey Patton
Late last month my mentor, the great Pulitzer-prize winning historian David Levering-Lewis, invited me to be his special guest at the 100th anniversary celebration of the NAACP’s Crisis Magazine. A rapt audience gathered inside the New York Hilton Hotel’s Trianon Ballroom to hear Lewis and current Crisis editor Jabari Asim have a conversation about the magazine’s early years and its first intrepid editor-in-chief, W.E.B. Du Bois.

By John Payton
The death on February 28 of Theodore Lamont Cross deprives the world and American society and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. of an extraordinary counselor and friend.

By Jelani Cobb
Among Professor Howard Zinn’s numerous accomplishments, none rank higher than his work to breathe life into history. Often when I mention to people that I’m a historian I hear mumbled comments about how the subject put students to sleep or seems like a dry collection of dates, wars and speeches. Not so with Howard Zinn.

By The Editors
Eunice Johnson, who created the Ebony Fashion Fair in the mid-1950s and built it into a powerful social and financial success, was clairvoyant.

By The Editors
Percy Ellis Sutton, a son of Texas and of Harlem whose remarkable achievements in several different fields of endeavor helped fuel the twentieth-century progress of black Americans, was eulogized yesterday as “a role model in living color of what it means to be both great and good.

By Lee A. Daniels
They were criminals, all 400-plus of them, according to the duly enacted laws of the states of the Old Confederacy – lawbreakers, ‘race mixers,’ and disturbers of the peace.  Government officials and editorialists across the South called them “communists,” “socialists,” and “outside agitators.” They were beaten, with the connivance of the police, by Ku Klux Klan thugs in Alabama. They were jailed in Mississippi, first in the city jail in Jackson, and then, in the notorious Parchman state penitentiary. Their very lives were in danger.

They were the Freedom Riders.

By Eisa Nefertari Ulen
Rock and Roll is falsely thought of as white music—and not just by white people. Black folk have tended to identify Rock and Roll with the other side of the color line, leaving Black Rock in a ridiculously marginal place.

By James McBride
This is my nightmare: My daughter comes home with a guy and says, “Dad we’re getting married.”

And he’s a rapper, with a mouthful of gold teeth, a do-rag on his head, muscles popping out his arms, and a thug attitude. And then the nightmare gets deeper.

By Lee A. Daniels
For nearly two decades in the middle of the twentieth century, against daunting odds and the ever-present threat of lethal violence, she helped carry the torch of freedom into places where tyranny reigned. Later, she proved her remarkable commitment to public service could work to equally great effect in the arenas of politics, and the federal judiciary. Her name was Constance Baker Motley, and she was one of America’s great public citizens.