Opinions

Florida Is Just the Latest Battlefield in Right’s War on Education 

     It’s been a few weeks since a mess started boiling over in Florida with the rollout of the new AP African American Studies course, and no one involved is looking good: not the state Department of Education, not the College Board, and definitely not Gov. Ron DeSantis, who blasted the course publicly and pressured the College Board to water it down. Now DeSantis, pumped up by what he thinks is his victory over educators, is making noise about going after all AP courses in the state.   […]

Opinions

Young Black Achievers Making Black History Today

      February is Black History Month and we must acknowledge that many of our young Black men and women are making monumental achievements. Many in America would make many think Black people are lazy, take drugs, and make babies with different women every night. Based on this thinking, Black men and women don’t work, the ladies are on welfare, and men are uneducated, and in jail. […]

Opinions

It Shouldn’t Take a Fiery Crash and Toxic Spill to Push Action on Railroad Safety

     Five of the derailed cars contained nearly 1 million pounds of vinyl chloride, a toxic flammable liquid; other cars carried butyl acrylate, ethylhexyl acrylate, and isobutylene. The spills from the wreck have left a long chemical plume moving down the Ohio River at about a mile an hour. The result has been at least 3,500 fish killed. The train’s owner Norfolk Southern said it is removing contaminated soil at the crash site, which can leach toxic chemicals into the water and air, after the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) raised questions. […]

Pastor Rasheed Baaith
Opinions

“ERASING OUR HISTORY”

     The lies, misrepresentations, and half-truths Gov. DeSantis is regurgitating about Black History is nothing short of a calculated strategy to destroy the truth of who we are and what we have accomplished. And what has been done to us by those who enslaved us. […]

Opinions

Time For Leaders to Confer and Plan

     Even the most uninvolved persons in our community know it is time to draw up plans that everyone can at least know or discover. It is time for our leaders to call us together, not to march, not to sing, but to confer with each other and make plans to organize a better life without fear and violence. Plans must include jobs, housing, economic development, and education about our history. […]

Opinions

Harnessing Consumer & Laborer Powers

     America’s laborers/consumers have long existed at the mercy of corporate entities dating back to the 19th Century. In 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act established the minimum wage at $0.25 an hour. Since 2009, the Federal minimum wage has remained at $7.25 per hour. Do the math.  This represents  a mere .03 percent increase over eighty-four years. […]

Opinions

‘Never Forget Our People Were Always Free – A Parable of American Healing’

Readers of Ben Jealous’s newest book – ‘Never Forget Our People Were Always Free – A Parable of American Healing’ – will grapple with its title’s meaning through the cumulative and very personal American experience of being, at some point, the outsider. And though now no longer uncommon to hear race referred to as an artificial social construct, we remain bound by simplistically crude dichotomies – White and Black as but one example. Jealous dissects and exposes aspects of our country’s variegated genetic history that continue to result in disastrous assumptions about the nature and identities of perpetrators of heinous deeds. […]