Category: Cover Story

It was the place to be, we were told throughout the Eighties and Nineties. The housing was cheap, the weather benign, the social and business networks poppin’, the elected officials black and enlightened, and the opportunities limitless. Twenty years before it had been “the city too busy to hate.” Now it was the “Black Mecca,”…

”African Americans are and have always been, in fact, clumped together on the left side of the conventional American political spectrum. An objective reading of the JCPES survey confirms some of the underlying basis for Blacks’ liberal voting patterns – which is long term bad news for the Right and self-styled Black conservatives. Still, this…

There is something very wrong going on in the Congressional Black Caucus. However, the malady has a long history. A class of Black politicians think that we exist to support them, rather than that they are elected to support us. The sickness became acute at the CBC Weekend, in Washington, DC – as much a…

For the first time in history, an African American group has graded the Congressional Black Caucus’s legislative performance on a curve that reflects the Black Political Consensus. The results were startling. Harold Ford, Jr., of Memphis, registered only a five percent positive grade, based on his votes on nine “bright line” issues that came before…

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the debate is already raging on how to deal with those displaced by the disaster and whether to rebuild New Orleans and other coastal communities. Competing interests combined with poor planning and a disjointed response from public and private agencies have created confusion about priorities, funding and other crucial…

”The flawed logic often perpetuated by the media is that only homosexual men have HIV, bisexual men only contract HIV through homosexual behavior, and the only way black women contract HIV is through sexual contact with these bisexual men,” Malebranche said. “Homosexuals are not the only ones with HIV, and just because someone keeps their…

The authors are Glen Ford and Peter Gamble, Co-Publishers of The Black Commentator. The Black Commentator has gone on hiatus for August, as we did last year, so that we can accomplish some tasks that the usual weekly toil prevents. It has been a good year for the publication, our third. It has been a…

“A great force of suffering accumulated between the basement of heaven and the roof of hell…” Zora Neale Hurston wrote those words almost seventy years ago at the beginning of her great allegorical work on black America, Moses, Man of the Mountain. She could have been speaking about African America today. As black activists ponder…

The pervasive corporate media bubble, which grossly distorts the views most Americans have of the world beyond their shores, and of life in America’s black one-eighth, operates to fool African Americans, too. While a fortunate few of us are doing very well indeed, and many more are hanging on as best we can, the conditions…

The media campaign to impose Cory Booker, rich white people’s favorite Black politician, on Black America, has begun in earnest – again. Booker, the one-term Newark city councilman who challenged Mayor Sharpe James in 2002, is making another run next year, and is certain to raise millions of dollars through his deep connections to the…