Week In Review

A clown wearing a President Barack Obama mask appeared at a Missouri State Fair rodeo this weekend and the announcer asked the enthusiastic spectators if they wanted to see “Obama run down by a bull.”

Read More

A representative says Grammy-winning jazz keyboardist and producer George Duke, whose sound infused acoustic jazz, electronic jazz, funk, R&B and soul, has died. He was 67. The representative said Duke died Monday night in Los Angeles. He was being treated for chronic lymphocytic leukemia.

Read More

A black woman who set off a racial firestorm as a teenager after alleging she was raped by a group of white men in 1987 has begun making defamation payments to one of them. Tawana Brawley has paid just over $3,700 to former county prosecutor Steven Pagones…

Read More

Why do middle-class blacks have far less wealth than whites at the same income level? The answer is in real estate and history. In 1973, my parents sold their modest house on Detroit’s West Side to Roosevelt Smith, a Vietnam War veteran and an assembly-line worker at Ford, and his wife…

Read More

Singer and entertainer Harry Belafonte last Friday called on Florida Gov. Rick Scott to listen to protesters who are asking for a special legislative session to examine the state’s self-defense laws after the acquittal of George Zimmerman.

Read More

Florida Gov. Rick Scott last Wednesday demanded an apology from longtime civil rights activist Jesse Jackson for comparing the state’s struggle with the Trayvon Martin case to the civil rights clashes with police during the 1960s in Selma, Ala.

Read More

During the bleakest days of the Great Recession, Congress agreed in bipartisan votes to bail out two of Detroit’s biggest businesses, General Motors and Chrysler. Today, however, there seems little appetite from either Democrats or Republicans in Washington for a federal rescue of the birthplace of the automobile industry.

Read More

When the Supreme Court struck down Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act last month with the Shelby County decision, many people thought that the states it applied to would see it as an invitation to scale voting rights back exponentially.

Read More

With chants and prayers, sermons and signs, outrage over a jury’s decision to clear George Zimmerman in the shooting of an unarmed black teenager poured from street protests and church pulpits Sunday amid calls for federal civil rights charges to be filed in the case.

Read More

The Pennsylvania voter ID trial began with the petitioner’s first expert witness, Bernard Siskin, a statistician. Siskin was called on to match two databases: one from the Department of State listing registered voters (known as the SURE database), and one from PennDOT…

Read More