NEWS
March 23, 2009
This time last year, virtually no one could have predicted that today both of the nation's two major political parties would be headed by African-Americans. Democrat Barack Obama's historic election as the first black president and Michael S. Steele's elevation to chairman of the Republican National Committee mark a watershed in race relations in this country that is literally unprecedented. Yet neither man could have hoped to achieve his present position without the political empowerment of African-Americans made possible by the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which guaranteed blacks across the South access to the ballot.
NEWS
By Douglas C. Lyons | February 22, 2009
The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama By Gwen Ifill Doubleday / 288 pages / $25.95 It's too bad Republicans backing their candidate in the recent presidential election chose to demean Gwen Ifill's The Breakthrough in hopes of disqualifying the venerable black journalist as the moderator of the vice presidential debate. Now that it's published, they should read the book. Ifill, a former reporter for Baltimore's Evening Sun and now the moderator and managing editor of PBS' Washington Week and a senior correspondent of The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, explores the landscape of black politics.
NEWS
By Stephen Kiehl | November 6, 2008
They voted when they had to pay a poll tax for the privilege, sat in the back of buses, chopped wood to heat segregated schools and stayed indoors at night when the Ku Klux Klan was in town. America's older black voters - who grew up under the doctrine of "separate but equal," came of age during the civil rights movement and this week saw an African-American elected president of the country that once deemed them less than full citizens - said yesterday that they could not believe what they had witnessed.
NEWS
By Gadi Dechter and Laura Smitherman | October 22, 2008
Gambling opponents are hoping that an alliance with black churches produces an upset defeat of the slots referendum when an expected record number of African-Americans turn up at Maryland polling booths next month. Slots foes hope that black voters energized by Barack Obama's presidential bid will heed their ministers' objections to gambling - as sermonized from pulpits across the state in recent weeks - and cast a ballot against Question 2, which would change the state's constitution to allow slot machine gambling.
NEWS
By Kelly Brewington | July 17, 2008
CINCINNATI - Appearing before some of his presidential rival's most ardent supporters, Sen. John McCain urged delegates to the NAACP convention yesterday to support school vouchers as a way to improve education in largely black, underperforming school systems. McCain acknowledged that he will have difficulty making inroads among black voters. But he used his speech to the Baltimore-based civil rights organization to criticize the education views of his Democratic opponent, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, and to argue that the country needs to move away from "conventional thinking" with regard to public schools.
NEWS
By C. Fraser Smith | May 25, 2008
They gave us the bullet to save themselves; they will give us the ballot to save themselves. - Frederick Douglass Unfortunately, the nation did not feel as indebted to black Americans as Douglass suggested it would. Perhaps the great ex-slave orator, abolitionist and native Marylander was not as confident as he sounded. He may have found it more politic to suggest that white America would do the right thing if only to repay black soldiers who fought on the Union side. But there was no immediate indication Americans believed their system was endangered by withholding the franchise.
NEWS
By Clarence Page | May 13, 2008
A day after her hoped-for monster triumph in the Indiana and North Carolina primaries fizzled, Sen. Hillary Clinton no longer seemed to care whom she offended. She dared to speak about race and gender in public with the candid language that even political consultants usually keep private. Despite losing big to Sen. Barack Obama in North Carolina's Democratic primary and barely squeaking out a victory in Indiana, she said in an interview with USA Today that "I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on."
NEWS
By C. Fraser Smith | February 3, 2008
Race, says Michael Fauntroy, a black political scientist at George Mason University, is the "undertow" of American politics. And yet, suddenly, its presence has been muted by a figure of confident, youthful charisma. For the first time in our history, an African-American - Sen. Barack Obama - is one of the leading contenders for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. For black voters, in particular, that fact is both thrilling and frightening. It raises a number of profound and sometimes troubling questions: He has an awesome r?
NEWS
By Paul West | January 21, 2008
WEST COLUMBIA, S.C. -- When Hillary Rodham Clinton started running for president, Wanjulia Ezekiel was thrilled. "I was looking forward to the advancement of a female," she said. But Sen. Barack Obama is getting her vote in this week's Democratic presidential primary in South Carolina. "He speaks to the possibility that I dreamed about as a child," explained the 40-year- old civil engineer from Columbia, the state capital. With Democrats on track to select either the party's first female or black presidential nominee, polls have suggested that black women such as Ezekiel are torn by conflicting loyalties to race and gender.
NEWS
By CLARENCE PAGE | January 17, 2008
In primary election campaigns, the fighting is often vicious because the differences are so small. That helps to explain why, despite so many more urgent foreign and domestic issues on the table in the Democratic presidential campaign, so much attention has been riveted lately on distractions. Did Sen. Barack Obama oppose the war in Iraq from the very beginning? He proudly did. Did Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton insult the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.? She proudly didn't. Yet former President Bill Clinton suddenly found his honorary "first black president" status in jeopardy after he ridiculed Mr. Obama's version of his Iraq war opposition as a "fairy tale."