Clarksdale, Miss. -- Anyone heading south down U.S. Highway 61 toward Clarksdale might not be surprised by the large tracts of verdant farmland.

The sight of the occasional working plow or murky bayou would seem about right for this Delta town best known as the spot where,

There's a comforting-to-white-people fiction about racism and racial inequality in the United States today: They're caused by a small, recalcitrant group who cling to their egregiously inaccurate beliefs in the moral, intellectual and economic superiority of white people.

The reality: racism and racial inequality aren't just supported by old ideas,...

NEW YORK -- Lawyers behind a federal class-action suit brought against the New York Police Department and the practice known as stop and frisk are expected to introduce over the next month one of the few known recordings of "Stop, Question and Frisk" in action, community...

NEW YORK -- On Saturday, inside the mahogany wood and white stone sanctuary at St. Catherine of Genoa Catholic Church, no one spoke openly about the New York Police Department’s impact on the church's East Flatbush neighborhood in Brooklyn.

No one mentioned the controversial tactic, formally called "stop-question-and-frisk," and...

Warnings about the Republican Party’s future have been dire since the November elections. Find a way to attract minority voters –- particularly the nation’s fast-growing Latino population -– or face losing the White House and down-ballot races for decades.

An analysis of a poll released...

NEW YORK -- The city's controversial stop-and-frisk police tactic faces new scrutiny this week as a federal civil trial began in four men's class-action claim they were illegally stopped, and records for two police officers who fatally shot a Brooklyn teenager this month showed repeated lawsuits filed by people who...

Dressed in a puffy black down jacket, gray hoody and indigo-colored jeans belted to expose a four-inch expanse of his plaid boxers, Malik Priestly stood outside the Tilden Educational Campus in the East Flatbush section of Central Brooklyn Saturday afternoon and paced.

Priestly stopped and stared at the door....

On Capitol Hill, there are two ways that people tend to talk about the sequester -- a slate of automatic federal spending cuts that are difficult but necessary, or a blunt tool that will inflict tremendous suffering.

But a growing chorus of researchers, political analysts and economists say that the...

CLARKSDALE, Miss. -- Patricia Unger gripped a relative’s arm and walked into a community college gym reconfigured to seat the large, mourning crowd, security and media crews her church could not hold.

At the end of a long center aisle sat a slate blue casket. The swollen, partially charred...

In Caracas, Venezuela, as news of Hugo Chavez’ death filtered into the streets, some supporters of the late president and his brand of socialism wept openly. Chavistas, as they are called, benefitted from subsidies that radically altered the lives of the country’s poor.

But in Doral, Fla., a...

Although few hard facts have emerged about the alleged murder of Marco McMillian, the black openly-gay mayoral candidate found dead in Mississippi last week, family members, friends and civil-rights advocates say that the crime does not appear to be a random act of violence. They're calling on officials...

The number of anti-government “patriot” groups, including paramilitary hate organizations, reached an all-time high in 2012, fanned by President Barack Obama's reelection and talk of gun control following the Newtown, Conn., elementary school massacre, according to a report issued Tuesday by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Patriot groups...

In the days since Marco McMillian’s body was recovered near a Mississippi Delta levee, people around the state and the world have begun to wonder if the openly gay, African American mayoral candidate was killed because of his sexuality, his political ambitions or none of the above.

McMillian...

Bryan Stevenson knows that when most people take the 40-minute tree-lined drive from Birmingham, heading south on Interstate 65 to the sliver of the city and other bedroom communities that sit inside Shelby County, Ala., they probably look around and see something akin to living, breathing Southern progress.

NEW YORK -- A full 40 percent of the people who call New York City home and 30 percent of all its registered voters were born abroad.

So it’s no wonder that the Democrats vying to become the city’s next mayor lean heavily on a well-known set of bromides...

Ask Ricardo Martinez, co-executive director of the Denver-based parent and student activist group Padres & Jóvenes Unidos, and he will tell you that it’s not unheard of for kids at the city’s high schools and some junior highs to end up in handcuffs if they are caught chewing...

Well folks, the fact that names tend to be passed down or reused inside families and certain names appear to be preferred by black and white parents, should come as a surprise to precisely no one. But a new paper released by the National Bureau of Economic Research...

Before his son died, Ron Davis had had just one distant brush with Florida’s gun laws.

Right around the time Davis retired from Delta Airlines in 2006, an airport security guard with a moonlighting gig at a local bank suggested that he apply for one of the state's new...

One of the last ideas attributed to Christopher Dorner, the now infamous former Los Angeles police officer suspected of killing four people before a shootout and fire left him dead, amounts to a stock line from a Hollywood action flick.

“What would you do to clear your...

This week, I worked on a story about the emotional toll of workplace discrimination - real or perceived - and just why so many people of color seem to identify with some, but certainly not all, of former Los Angles cop Christopher Dorner's experiences.

The story should...