African American women continue to have higher rates of unemployment than white women and continue to have lower amounts of weekly usual earnings and median wealth compared to their male counterparts and white women. These disparities leave a growing portion of our population more vulnerable to poverty and its implications.

Considering the fact that “black fatherhood” is a phrase that is almost alwaysaccompanied by the word “crisis” in U.S. society, it’s understandable that the CDC’s results seem innovative. But in reality, the new data builds upon years of research that’s concluded that hands-on parenting is similar among dads of all races. There’s plenty of scientific evidence to bust this racially-biased myth.

“FIFTY YEARS DISTILLED” 

Fifty years ago, there came from many quarters of our nation a youthful diversity of ethnicities, opinions, lifestyles, and persuasions, a cadre of risk-takers committed to lifting the last burden from the shoulders of the world’s last oppressed woman and man.  Our coming together was more than idealism that has since been celebrated as the Mississippi Summer of 1964.

While countless pundits and chroniclers from without have vertically described, discussed and even extolled the seasonal events of that year, this is the rare occasion, some fifty years later, for a horizontal view of those who survived to tell the story — its origins, frustrations, triumphs and its aspirations as well as hope.

With the doves outnumbering the ravens in the parliament of our hair, this is our unbent and unbowed voice calling to those who must succeed us as radical agents of change.  We want them to know that ours was more than theory and faith.  It was more than uplifting rhetoric and freedom songs — It was pragmatic and tedious, dangerous and deadly, not only for us but more importantly for the locals who believed in us with their lives.  May this passage of time reveal what the present once obscured.  It comes as a special comfort to know that we were far better then than we could have ever known then.

Remembering Medgar Wiley Evers, Civil Rights Activist, who was assassinated June 12, 1963.   Evers was born July 2, 1925 in Decatur, Mississippi. 

In 1943, he was inducted into the army where he fought in France during World War II and was honorably discharged in 1945 as a sergeant. Evers earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in business administration from Alcorn College in 1952. Soon after, he moved to Mound Bayou, Mississippi and became involved with the Regional Council of Negro Leadership. In 1954, Evers was appointed Mississippi’s first field secretary for the NAACP. Evers was involved in a boycott campaign against white merchants and was instrumental in desegregating the University of Mississippi. A couple of weeks before his death, a Molotov cocktail was thrown into the carport of his home and five days before his death he was nearly run down by a car as he emerged from the Jackson, Mississippi NAACP office.

Mourned nationally, Evers was buried in Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors. Later that year, Evers was posthumously awarded the NAACP Spingarn Medal. In 1964, Byron De La Beckwith was arrested and twice tried for Evers’ murder. In both trials, all-white juries deadlocked on his guilt.

Finally, in 1994 De La Beckwith was convicted of the murder. In 1969, Medgar Evers College was established as part of the City University of New York. In 1983, a made-for-television movie, “For Us the Living: The Medgar Evers Story,” was aired on PBS. In 1992, the city of Jackson, Mississippi erected a statue in honor of Evers and in 2004 they changed the name of their airport to Jackson-Evers International Airport. The USNS Medgar Evers supply ship was launched by the United States Navy in 2011. “The Autobiography of Medgar Evers: A Hero’s Life and Legacy Revealed through His Writings, Letters, and Speeches” was published in 2005.

Acclaimed Actress, Passionate Activist Ruby Dee, now Ancestral Mother

Announcing her Mother’s transition, Nora Davis Day told The Associated Press on Thursday that her mother died at home in New Rochelle on Wednesday night of "natural causes."

Further she said, "We have had her for so long and we loved her so much," Day said. "She took her final bow last night at home surrounded by her children and grandchildren."

Day added: "We gave her our permission to set sail," said Day. "She opened her eyes, closed her eyes and away she went."

"In Latin America and Caribbean countries like the Dominican Republic many deny being of African decent, despite 90 percent of the population possessing black ancestry. Where has the blackness gone in the region?"
Originally aired on June 10, 2014

The race problem in the United States …has been a visible or invisible factor in almost every important question of domestic policy since the foundation of the Government.”

— Charles Hamilton Houston, 1934 — In the legacy of the Negro Convention Movement of the 1800’s and the Pan Africanist Movement of the 1900’s, we are convening a National Summit on Race, to spin, broadly, along four (4) axes: consultation, documentation, declaration and actualization. We invite those who share our belief that the unresolved issues of race and disparate consequences of white privilege in this nation have dire consequences for the country’s future and the world. We seek to create a space—for a deliberative process among scholars, activists, professionals in many fields and faith leaders—to generate recommendations for an historic course correction around America’s racial future. This process will provide a framework for linking our struggles across the Diaspora and beyond.For More Informationhttp://www.racesummit.org/