Category: Cover Story

The current issue is always free to all readers The picture in the ad immediately caught my attention. The photo was of a very dignified older African American man looking into the camera, very determined and equally pensive. Underneath his photo was a caption giving his name—T. Willard Fair—and the fact that he was the…

It was on February 21, 1965 that Malcolm X was assassinated at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan, New York by forces that were trying to stop his impact on our movement. They were not successful. He will forever remain our “Shining Black Prince.” Malcolm X was a man who should be studied carefully in our…

Senator Barack Obama has become a major celebrity, a truth that is now almost a cliché. His campaign has raised massive amounts of funding. He draws large and enthusiastic crowds when he appears. Often described as charismatic, he is more importantly smart and well spoken. Yet before I jump into his campaign, I have a…

You may have noticed BlackCommentator.com was not available for as much as 48 hours between about 11pm Saturday, April 28, 2007 into Monday, April 30, 2007 (Eastern Time Zone) due to some adjustments to the way the computer on which this Website resides connects to the WWW. The downtime was necessary to upgrade the bandwidth…

Don Imus wasn’t the only person to open his mouth and unleash a political storm on the subject of race. It went hardly mentioned in the major media of this country but as the Guardian (UK) put it, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, last week claimed a recent spate of knife and gun murders in…

Rev. Jesse Jackson has endorsed Sen. Barack Obama’s Democratic presidential campaign. I must say, I am a little ambivalent about this endorsement. We are a people who have clung to hope. Hope is what sustained us through enslavement and exploitation. Both men speak highly of hope. One, while pursuing the Democratic candidacy for president, inspired…

One thing had to dawn on Bush while on a recent seven-day, five country Latin American tour: the Monroe Doctrine is deader than a doorknob. Unilaterally proclaimed by the U.S. in the 19th Century, ostensibly to keep European competitors out, the doctrine secured domination of the lands to the south – frequently guaranteed by armed…

Bruce Gordon’s resignation as President (formerly called the Executive Director) of the NAACP “shocked the world” as Cassius Clay once said. It even shocked half the folks in the NAACP. It didn’t shock me, though. In my first book, Souls For Sale:The Diary of an Ex-Colored Man, which is about my experience as a young…

Introduction For much of the postwar period, a higher share of African-American workers have been in unions than workers from other racial and ethnic backgrounds. As union representation and union coverage have declined for the country as a whole, unionization rates for African-Americans have fallen more quickly than for the rest of the workforce. Black…