Gunplay and the Presidency
On February 18th, Rupert Murdock's New York Post published a cartoon of two beefy white policemen who have just slain the author of the stimulus package—a chimpanzee who lies in a pool of blood. The paper's defense—just good-hearted fun, no harm intended to the first African American President who devised and just signed the package... {Read this essay}

Current Events: The Election of 2008
Yes, a Black man will command the world's strongest nuclear-armed military, a Black First Lady will preside over White House functions, and their little children will play on the country's most famous lawn. But has the poison of racism been driven from the political arena, the school system, the justice system, the prison system and the housing and job market? {Read this essay}

Current Events: "Kill Him"—A Political Chronicle
Two white skinhead believers in "white power" who planned to assassinate candidate Barack Obama in a shooting spree that also targeted African American school children have been arrested by federal authorities in Tennessee. The two men, 20 and 18, are charged with illegal possession of a sawed-off shotgun, plans to rob a firearms dealer and making threats against a presidential candidate. The arrest, weeks before the election, is a concrete sign that the terrifying "A-word" of U.S. politics has entered a tumultuous and ground-breaking battle for the White House.... {Read this essay}

Book Review: New York and Slavery: Time to Tell the Truth (2008)
As some southern legislatures, prodded by African American representatives, expressed regret over their states' role in slave trading and exploiting slave labor, a kind of "truth and reconciliation" movement has stirred educators. So far the focus has been on the southern states where African people were brutally exploited, their families sundered, resulting in a civil war and a nation wide system of racial inequality. Now some educators who welcome this truth are claiming it omits the complicity of "the free North"... {Read more}

History: Black Indians: From Concept to Birth
Black Indians as a concept and book was born out of a melding of four disparate elements: 1) a consuming interest in little-known aspects of African American history that began during my high school days in World War II; 2) an immersion in the pioneering research of Professor Kenneth Wiggins Porter in the 1960s; 3) a surprise conversation with Langston Hughes about my first book; and 4) the unforgettable faces of people of African lineage who peered at me from my collection of Native American photographs... {Read more}

History: Celebrating a Victory for Freedom
December 24th, 2007 marks the 170th anniversary of the U.S. government's first significant military defeat in its first foreign incursion. The place was Florida, then a Spanish colony. The foe was a united force of Africans, on the run from the south's slave plantations, and Seminoles, whose self-determination was endangered. The runaway Africans had been establishing prosperous, self-governing communities in the peninsula since 1738. During the American Revolution they merged with Seminole Indians into a multicultural nation that cultivated crops according to techniques learned in Senegambia and Sierra Leone. Out of this came an alliance that shaped effective diplomatic and military responses to invaders and slavecatchers... {Read more}