By Lee A. Daniels Both mayoral candidates in Washington D.C.’s Democratic primary earlier this month were black. But that didn’t prevent the contest from becoming a heated referendum on race relations and racial politics at the local level of the nation’s capitol. And when the vote-counting ended, Adrian Fenty, the erstwhile wunderkind who four years [...]

By George E. Curry
After sweeping every ward four years ago en route to becoming the youngest person ever elected mayor of Washington, D.C., Adrian Fenty was decisively ousted on Tuesday, largely by African-American voters who perceived him as arrogant and unconcerned about issues of greatest concern to them.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, what does one call the ruse of pretending to imitate? By Lee A. Daniels There are roughly 38 million African Americans in America. Why did so few of them show up at the Glenn Beck- Sarah Palin “Restoring Honor” rally at the Lincoln Memorial on Saturday? Salon [...]

By The Editors
Sometime next year Martin Luther King, Jr. will likely become more visible, more available, one might say, to millions more Americans.

By Lee A. Daniels
There is no “battle for Dr. King’s legacy,” as one newspaper headline, intended to be attention-grabbing, put it this week. The legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. and of the black freedom struggle was affirmed for all time at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963.

By The Editors
Support for legislation that would have given the residents of the District of Columbia a voting representative in Congress, seemingly assured earlier this month, collapsed this week over an amendment to the bill that would have substantially weakened the city’s gun-control law.

By Jackie Jones
Gay and lesbian couples are now able to marry legally in the nation’s capital. A large part of making that happen came from a direct campaign to win the support of the city’s African-American residents, long believed to be opposed to such a law.

By: Herndon L. Davis
The nation’s capital is in the midst of an enormous and rapidly growing healthcare epidemic: 3 percent of its population is living with HIV/AIDS and 76.3 percent of these people are black.  Even worse, the numbers are likely to be severely undercounted as the race to identify more residents who unknowingly are HIV positive or have full-blown AIDS continues.