Emmett Till was murdered on August 28, 1955. They found his body horribly mangled at the bottom of the Tallahatchie River with a cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire. Till had dared to break one of the sacred rules of the Jim Crow South....

Black America is in crisis. In a recent study, the National Urban League reported that almost all the economic gains made by African Americans over the last 30 years have been lost during the Great Recession. Black unemployment now stands at 16.2 percent, harkening back to 1982 when...

"There is much in religion, when misused, that does lead to a fascist state....And it is the corruptors of religion who are a major menace to the world today, in giving the profound patterns of religious thought a crude and sinister distortion." -- Kenneth Burke

I have not been able,...

Ugliness abounds. It is to be somewhat expected given these trying times. Americans are struggling, and those struggles have added a sense of edginess to our public life. It doesn't feel like politics as usual. Something lurks beneath. I believe that it is the human tendency, in moments of loss...

"To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else....

I can only imagine that someone with no intimate knowledge of the humiliation of Jim Crow -- of having to go to the back door of a restaurant or simply being refused service because of the color of one's skin -- would find the recent comments of Rand Paul compelling....

I am a native of Mississippi. I was born and raised on the Gulf Coast in a relatively small town named after the moss that dangles -- at least before disease struck -- from magnolia trees. And this quaint and complicated place, no matter how far I go or run,...

The word nigger found its way back into our national conversation recently. Some tea party activists hurled the epithet at Congressman John Lewis. Along the way they called Representative Barney Frank a faggot and spat on Congressman Emanuel Cleaver. This venom was supposedly provoked by health care reform; it only...

March 7, 2010 marked the 45th anniversary of "Bloody Sunday," the first of three civil rights marches in Selma, Alabama in 1965. The courage of that moment has captured our national imagination. Indeed the Edmund Pettus Bridge stands as a monument of sorts - a sacred space characterized by the...

The Black Church, as we've known it or imagined it, is dead. Of course, many African Americans still go to church. According to the PEW Research Center's Forum on Religion and Public Life, 87 percent of African Americans identify with a religious group and 79 percent say that religion is...