When I was in grade school in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, I went to PS 138 just off Nostrand Avenue. In third grade, we kept having substitute teachers and the books for our class didn't arrive until a month into the school year. It was an all black school in a...

In the iconography of America, no group is as revered as mothers with children. Virtually every Norman Rockwell painting around these holiday times during my youth provided an almost saintly image of mothers - literally the bedrock of American values. Of course, how we've treated mothers and children in the...

A few months ago I went to Albany by train and took a taxi to the Capitol. I was the only one in the cab. My driver was my age - late 50's, early 60's - and white, and clearly not in a good mood. He took one look at...

When under real pressure, I love to go out and eat. It's the worst thing to do for controlling weight, but I have a very unscientific belief that it's atavistic. When things went wrong for our early ancestors, they either had sex or, even better, brought down a mastodon and...

Growing up in Crown Heights in the 1950's-60's was not only to be witness to the end of overt racial discrimination in New York City, but also to see the huge expansion of the black middle class. Black professionals had always lived in my neighborhood. In fact, a segregated New...

It must be hard to be an elected official today and ten times harder if you're a controversial one taking on unpopular causes for people without power. It seems to me that a whole generation of elected black officials is under scrutiny for financial improprieties and missteps. Some of them...

I was born in 1948, on the forward edge of baby boomers. If it's one thing we have in common as a group, it is that we almost all had parents who talked endlessly (or so it seemed to me as an adolescent) about what they and their parents had...

Two recent news stories keep coming together in my mind. The first is the incredible Goldman Sachs bonuses amounting to more than $16 billion. It will provide approximately 31,700 of its employees $700,000 each even if they were somewhat mediocre, and multiple millions for the stars! The news story is...

Sometimes I wonder if advocacy for people without political power, money or political influence can be effective. At least today after a lead editorial in the New York Times supporting the findings and recommendations of a report we are releasing on the state of GED in New York City, I'm...

Over the last few weeks, I've had the feeling that I'm living through an episode of the Twilight Zone. We've now seen innumerable articles about Roman Polanski and how he's being mistreated for drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl (I admit I'm biased because I have a young daughter and...

From town-hall-meeting-bullies shouting down members of Congress to Joe "You Lie" Wilson of South Carolina disrespecting the President at a joint session of Congress, 2009 has been a year of dramatic political theater. A conservative activist with a hidden video camera set out to embarrass ACORN -- and succeeded --...

It's time to be really tough on criminals, make it so they have to get a job when they get out of jail -- let them suffer like the rest of us.

But over the last two decades, the New York State Legislature and governors have been doing precisely the...

As my friend Pablo Eisenberg, Senior Fellow at Georgetown University's Public Policy Institute, wrote in a recent article in The Chronicle of Philanthropy, the Senate Democrats' recent passage of a measure to deny all federal funding to Acorn, the nation's leading community organizing organization, strikes me as pandering to the...

I know it's not nice to gloat -- to say "I told you so" -- but the recent news reports on the financial turmoil at Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village -- involving over 11,000 apartments in 110 buildings -- is just too good a story of greed and stupidity...

I've lived on the same block in Prospect Heights Brooklyn for 30 years and I grew up on Dean Street, 15 blocks away in Crown Heights, so I know about this part of Brooklyn. One of the constants for the last 30 years is that you know the summer is...

Some years ago, the Community Service Society (CSS) issued a report, Shortchanging Security, on the working conditions for non-unionized security guards in New York City. We found that working conditions were pretty bleak; 63,000 mostly Black and Latino men got around $10.00 an hour, with no benefits, no vacation...

I'm starting to feel that I don't live in the same New York City as everyone else does. I've read my four newspapers today (New York Times, Daily News , Wall Street Journal, New York Post) and, from their perspective, Jeter's MVP hopes, Madoff's cancer, lobster boat racing (you guess),...

When I mention to people I meet for the first time that I lead a nonprofit, I often get the look I sometimes display when introduced to a priest or naïve young person -- how nice for you to do good deeds, the rest of us have to work for...

I guess I, like many others, get the feeling that we go through experiences in life that don't seem to be particularly important, which we only recognize in hindsight were significant historical moments. I feel a bit like the character in Forest Gump or the movie Zelig, where you are...

A debate raged in the Black intellectual community in the early twentieth century (1895-1915) that still has relevance in 2009. Should the movement focus on the promotion of a "talented 10th" of highly educated Black intellectuals as the means toward Black progress or focus instead on the technical education...