Some of the most toxic communities in the country
confronted the Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday, hoping for a sign that the new administration is more willing than its predecessor to deal with the legacy of environmental racism in the south.
EPA Region 4 includes Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee.
As Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, in increasing defiance of the
feds' decision to strip him of his street-level federal immigration
authority, charges forward with another of his notorious anti-immigrant sweeps today, listeners of NPR's "The Takeaway" were treated to an illuminating glimpse at Sheriff Joe's political vision.
After a tour of the country last year, a United Nations special
rapporteur (4/28/09) urged Washington to do more to address "the depth
of racism [that] still permeates all dimensions of life of American
society." Not "questions of race," not "past racism," not "personal
biases"--but present-day, institutional racism, as expressed in, for
example, "racial bias in conviction rates and length of sentences of
both juvenile and criminal courts," "direct discriminatory practices in
housing...as well as in mortgage lending," and in
Federal authorities are investigating an Aug. 20 incident in which armed white citizens, using a military vehicle, helped search for an unarmed black burglary suspect in the Delta.
U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, of Mississippi's second congressional district, confirmed to the Jackson Free Press Monday that the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice are investigating the manhunt, which took place outside Sumner in Tallahatchie County.
Confronted with images of corpses floating in the blackened floodwaters or baking in the sun on abandoned highways, there aren't too many people left who see what happened following Hurricane Katrina as a purely "natural" disaster.
LeAlan Jones, the 30-year-old Green Party candidate for Barack Obama’s old Senate seat in Illinois, is as angry at injustice as he is at the African-American intellectual and political class that accommodates it. He does not buy Obama’s “post-racial” ideology or have much patience with African-American leaders who, hungry for prestige, power and money, have, in his eyes, forgotten the people they are supposed to represent. They have confused a personal ability to be heard and earn a comfortable living with justice.
BOSTON -
Supporters of a prominent Harvard University black scholar who was arrested at his own home by police responding to a report of a break-in say he is the victim of racial profiling.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. had forced his way through the front door of his home because it was jammed, his lawyer said Monday.
Cambridge police say they responded to the well-maintained two-story home near campus after a woman reported seeing "two black males with backpacks on the porch," with one "wedging his shoulder into the door as if he was trying to force entry."
Television news reports are casting new light on the violence that flourished in New Orleans in the anarchic days after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
The reports -- broadcast Thursday by WTAE TV in Pittsburgh [1] and WDSU in New Orleans [2] -- focus on two unsolved crimes: the near-fatal shooting of Donnell Herrington, who was allegedly attacked by a group of white vigilantes in the Algiers Point
When James Wenneker von Brunn murdered
Stephen T. Johns at the Holocaust Memorial Museum earlier this month,
history was less made than revealed. Officer Johns, a 39-year-old
African-American family man, was an easygoing guard, affectionately
known to colleagues as "Big John.'' That his last act was to open the
door for a member of the public defines his goodness. That von Brunn,
an 88-year-old white supremacist and anti-Semite, simply opened fire on
the man holding the door defines his malevolence. But more is at work
here than an act of lunacy.
In May, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan declared [1]
the Obama administration's intent to close and "turn around" 5,000
'underperforming" public schools in poorer neighborhoods across the
country.
