Current Events: The Election, the "White Hope" and the "A Word"
Mentioning the "A word" during any election season is no joke. Gunmen have ended the lives of four presidents: Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan narrowly escaped assassination attempts. Candidate Robert Kennedy was slain, and candidate George Wallace was so severely wounded that he had to bow out of his campaign. With a Black candidate in the field, any assassination reference has an even more sinister ring that cannot be stilled by "regrets"... {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}

Current Events: Waterboarding and U.S. History
Some high U.S. officials claim not be aware of it, and Judge Michael Mukasey, the President's choice for attorney general, prefers to equivocate, but water boarding has long been a form of torture that causes excruciating pain and can lead to death. It forces water into prisoner's lungs, usually over and over again. The Spanish Inquisition in the late 1400s used this torture to uncover and punish heretics, and then in the early 1500s Spain's inquisitors carried it overseas to root out heresy in the New World... {Read more}

History: Race and Racism in the Scottsboro Era (1930's)
This case of African American youths caught in the web of southern injustice, sentenced to death, thrown into a prison system that refused to recognize their humanity or their inalienable rights, shocked citizens of this country and people all over the world. At home Scottsboro intruded into the cultural, political and intellectual development of millions, particularly whites who had hardly given racial matters much thought... {Read more}

Current Events: Blood, Race and Cherokee Sovereignty
As President Bill Clinton and others arrived in Selma, Alabama for the 42nd anniversary of the "bloody Sunday" march that prodded Congress to pass the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the Cherokee Nation chose a lower road. Members voted overwhelmingly for an amendment to their constitution that revokes citizenship rights for 2,800 members because their ancestors included people of African descent... {Read more}

Tribute: Harry Belafonte Reaffirms a Proud Tradition
Harry Belafonte did more than speak truth to a President who lied to justify an invasion that has taken the lives of more than 2,000 Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis. He became part of a proud African American tradition Frederick Douglass started in 1848—opposition to a President who lies and sacrifices American lives in order to promote and justify wars of aggression... {Read more}