Category: View from the Battlefield

These people are not just stupid, insensitive or misguided; they are dangerous to all living things. You gotta’ give them their props. The Right has been diligently and systematically working on their draconian strategy for over 30 years. Setbacks occur but it presses on. Occasionally, it will boldly announce its moves as if it knows…

Bill Fletcher, a long-time friend of Manning�s, chose to take on the book�s detractors following the book�s release, a necessary task in order to put the criticisms in their proper perspective. But as important, in his article published in BlackCommentator.com following Manning�s death, Bill shared a discussion with him about how to use the book…

How many people will we be: I am Amadou Diallo! I am Oscar Grant! I am Troy Davis! I am Trayvon Martin! I am fill-in-the-blank! By now, our communities should be crystal clear on the historic and lethal patterns of racial profiling and violence by the criminal justice system. We seem to be less clear…

A couple of weeks ago, David Love penned an article �Reggie Clemons is Troy Davis.� The article highlighted the troubling doubts in the cases of Troy Davis and Reggie Clemons. Love had no idea that I�ve been working on the Clemons� case for twenty years (he does now since we talked about it!). The case…

What was inside a black, working class kid in the heat of a segregated society that made him or her think they could fly a plane? There were dozens of these young people whose dreams of flying took them to Tuskegee, AL where an experiment to prove that black people lacked the courage to fight…

The second anniversary of the earthquake that shook the island of Haiti has come and gone. While the images of destruction dim, the unanswered questions about recovery and reconstruction must remain loud and constant. The 7.0-magnitude quake created yet another set back for a people who seem to be perpetual victims of natural and man-made…

Dr. King challenged the Teamsters in his most eloquent but penetrating words. He started off by acknowledging the limited accomplishments of civil rights movements on segregation: �It will not be easy to accomplish this program because white America has had cheap victories up to this point. The limited reforms we won have been obtained at…

For most of us, we left 2011with mixed emotions. And while our individual situations and progress vary, it is important that we look at the bigger picture as the struggle over who government serves and how the social needs of a nation get met. It is painfully clear that most elected officials are either incapable…

In 1969, a black teenager at a St. Louis hospital died from baffling symptoms that doctors had attempted to treat over a fifteen month period. Almost 20 years later, it was confirmed that the patient known as Robert R. died of AIDS and was probably the first case in the U.S. Sample tissues had been…

The Occupy Wall Street Movement is now about a month old. It began way before people gathered at Zuccotti Park, which sits in the shadows of Wall Street. It began before the Canadian anti-capitalist maga zine Adbuster issued a call to spark an American “Tahrir moment” (in reference to the situation in Cairo that resulted…