Category: Guest Commentary

When I was a nineteen-year-old soldier in South Viet Nam, one of the tunes played most often on Armed Forces radio was “Jimmy Mack” by Martha Reeves and the Vandellas. Although a great pop classic with pulsing bass and a tight horn section underneath Martha’s fabulous vocal, the content of “Jimmy Mack” was about little…

Laura Bush wants everyone to just relax; and more to the point, she wants the media to aid in the process of nerve-calming by restraining themselves from what she sees as a growing tendency to scare the public with stories of impending cataclysm. From repetitive coverage of the “orange alert” announced by Homeland Security Director…

In an unusual piece that deserves wider attention, William Raspberry (“Our Insane Focus on Iraq,” The Washington Post, 9 September, 2002) laid out some of the psychological issues underlying the “Shrub” Bush’s pathological obsession with Iraq and Saddam Hussein. Mr. Raspberry wrote: The administration’s monomaniacal focus on Iraq’s Saddam Hussein as the fount of all…

In 1964, a young man named Lawrence Guyot epitomized black America’s long struggle for the right to vote when he organized the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to protest the state’s all-white elections, and its decision to send an all-white delegation to that year’s nominating convention in Atlantic City. In the face of violent resistance, Guyot…

“The spirit was freedom and justice And its keepers seem generous and kind Its leaders were supposed to serve the country But now they won’t pay it no mind ‘Cause the people grew fat and got lazy And now their vote is a meaningless joke They babble about law and order But it’s all just…

Now that Senator Trent Lott (R. Miss.) has resigned as Senate Majority Leader, the news cycle has moved on to other issues. But the Lott Affair ought not to be shoved under the rug so quickly. For Latinos in particular, the episode raises a number of intriguing issues. Despite the hoary black/white paradigm that still…

The writer is the founding President of the W. E. B. Du Bois Foundation, Inc., honoring his stepfather, and a retired Professor in Journalism and African-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. The unprecedented victory for the party in power in the recent midterm elections means war with Iraq is now inevitable – unless…

There is not a more coveted degree by the status-starved Black elite than that which is conferred by Harvard University. The Cambridge center of traditional American intellectualism can lay claim to having stamped a goodly number of government and industry leaders with its crimson imprimatur. A negro wearing a Harvard brand has always earned special…

On December 1, events in Washington, DC and around the world commemorated World AIDS Day. Throughout this week we focus on the terrible toll this plague has taken, and continues to take, in our communities, across our country, and worldwide. It is a time when we reflect on our shared vulnerability in the face of…

Editors: The Native American presence in many African America family trees is well known, both through conventional documentation and oral history. Less widely understood are the “Black Indians,” the African-descended people who were joined with the “Five Civilized Tribes” of the southeastern U.S. under a legal status that the U.S. government recognized as slavery –…