theblackbottom

By:Jennie L Phillips
Published: Tuesday, November 29, 2011, 5:06 PM Updated: Tuesday, November 29, 2011, 5:30 PM
African-Americans continue to be much harder hit than whites by the economic downturn and resulting unemployment.
A story in today’s New York Times points out that In October, the black unemployment rate was 15.1 percent, compared with [...]

In a fiery summons to an important voting block, President Barack Obama told blacks on Saturday to quit crying and complaining and “put on your marching shoes” to follow him into battle for jobs and opportunity.
And though he didn’t say it directly, for a second term, too.
Obama’s speech to the annual awards dinner of the [...]

By Antoinette Campbell, CNN
updated 6:13 PM EST, Mon September 19, 2011

Washington (CNN) – College presidents from predominantly black institutions across the country gathered in the nation’s capital Monday for a conference commemorating National Historically Black Colleges and Universities Week.
The two-day conference, titled “HBCUs: Engaging the World Anew,” began just days after President Barack Obama signed [...]

The Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) launched a “For the People” Jobs Initiative Monday, including nationwide job fairs and town hall meetings in response to alarmingly high unemployment rates in America.
A job fair and town hall at Cleveland State University in Ohio will be the first part of the CBC’s initiative.
TheGrio.com reports:
“Recently, [...]

By MICAH COHEN
The New York Times
This is Part 2 of an interview with David Wasserman, the House editor of The Cook Political Report. Mr. Wasserman is Cook’s resident redistricting expert and the author of “Better Know a District,” The Cook Political Report’s 2012 redistricting outlook. (Readers might also want to check out Cook’s redistricting scorecard [...]

By Jann S. Wenner
Sep 28, 2010 7:00 AM EDT
The following is an article from the October 15, 2010 issue of Rolling Stone.
We arrived at the southwest gate of the white house a little after one o’clock on the afternoon of September 17th. It was a warm fall day, but the capital felt quiet [...]

Ronald W. Walters, one of the country’s leading scholars of the politics of race, who was a longtime professor at Howard University and the University of Maryland, died Friday of cancer at Suburban Hospital in Bethesda. He was 72.
Dr. Walters was both an academic and an activist, cementing his credentials with [...]

For all the talk of Maxine Water’s so call “ethics violations” the people in her district love and respect her. We have very few “Democrats,” especially blue-dog ones standing up for the black and brown urban working class and poor. We will watch the outcomes of Ms. Water’s very carefully.
Still Waters: Lawmaker remains popular at [...]

We do not relish a promising candidate losing his bid to become Alabama’s first African American governor. We believe Mr. Davis was ill served by not being bold and supporting federal health care reform. It seemed a calculated strategy to appease fearful white Alabamians that backfired. We hope that Mr. Davis will take the lessons [...]

The number of African-Americans who say they trust the U.S. government is nearly twice the number of whites who say that. The finding, from a recent poll on trust in America, is a sharp turnaround from previous years.
Blacks have never trusted government in the same way whites have, though the ups [...]