theblackbottom

Once You Learn How to Read, You Will Be Forever Free!~Frederick Douglass
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Alex Heard is an editor at Wired magazine. He has also edited and written for The New York Times Magazine, Outside, The New Republic, Slate, and many other publications.
Nadifa Mohamed was born in Hargesia, Somalia in 1981 and was educated in the [...]

My uncle, Edward Nelson, Jr., whom we called June, was disabled. Throughout my childhood I never thought about him having a disability of any kind. To me he was physically strong, exceedingly intelligent, and an avid reader of newspapers and magazines, Times-Picayune, the National Enquirer, and the Jet along with westerns and detective novels. In [...]

Congress Approves Crack Cocaine Sentencing Changes
Tribune Washington Bureau
3:19 PM PDT, July 28, 2010
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Washington…Addressing what both Democrats and Republicans agreed was a quarter-century old injustice in drug sentencing, Congress gave final approval Wednesday to a bill reducing the penalty for crack cocaine offenders.
The legislation, which was welcomed by the Obama administration, reduces the disparities between sentences [...]

The loss of civil rights advocate William L. Taylor
Friday, July 2, 2010; A22
Source: Washington Post

BILL TAYLOR was not one of those bold-face Washington names — except to those in the civil rights movement. If you were in that movement, you probably knew William L. Taylor, who died Monday at the age of [...]

Once you learn how to read, you will be forever free~Frederick Douglass
Nikki Jones is an assistant professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her areas of expertise include urban ethnography, urban sociology, race and ethnic relations and criminology and criminal justice, with a special emphasis on the intersection of race, gender, and justice.
Charles Ogletree [...]

Dear Senators Cornyn, Grassley, Kyl, and Sessions,
I am writing you all to express my disappointment concerning your recent comments regarding the late Associate Justice Thurgood Marshall.  All of you described Justice Marshall service (1967-1991) on the Supreme Court as “activist,” “result oriented,” and outside the “mainstream.” Unfortunately for the American people, whose historical memories are [...]

For more information see the Equal Justice Initiative

Ghana ranked top in press freedom

Kent Mensah, AfricaNews editor in Accra, Ghana
Ghana ranked first in Africa in 2009 and 27th across the world as the country that tolerates media freedom, according to the Reporteur Sans Frontiers (RSF). The organization said journalists go about their duties without any hindrance from the government.

The [...]

George A Bayard III
A native of Delaware, and has lived in Grand Rapids for 21 years. He is married to Deborah and has 3 children. George gradated from the University of Delaware with bachelor’s degree in Art & Education. He worked in the Wilmington public schools teaching art before becoming regional manager for one of [...]

Tyler Branson is an American Studies Master’s student at the University of Kansas, originally from Norman, Oklahoma. His current interests include the confluence of race, technology, rhetoric, and politics.

Arizona governor Jan Brewer recently signed a bill into law that further facilitates what the Economist has rightly called “hysterical nativism,” or rather, a law that, [...]