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Ugandans Defend Criminalizing Gay People and Tell Obama to Back Off
The call from the BBC in London came at 7:30 Monday morning. They wanted to know if I could be a guest on the BBC World Service News radio talk show World Have Your Say to discuss Barack Obama’s public and pointed condemnation of a proposed Ugandan measure that would harden the African nation’s already…
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Rodney King's Legacy: A Civil Rights Symbol
(The Root) — We all make mistakes. Some are bigger than others. And if we survive them, most of us try to learn from our mistakes, make amends and move on. Rodney King made the biggest mistake of his life — drinking and driving — on the night of March 3, 1991, when four white…
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LA Riots: Could They Happen Again?
The 1992 Los Angeles riots were one of the biggest stories of my career and among the most personal. I wasn’t just a reporter covering the worst civil unrest in modern U.S. history. I was also an African-American man and father of an adolescent son ever mindful of close encounters of the worst kind with…
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The Root Cities: Who's Got the Money in La La Land?
When Oprah Winfrey decided to throw her billionaire celebrity behind a presidential candidate for the very first time, it was no coincidence that she did it in Los Angeles. Nor was it surprising that while her home is in Chicago, the world’s richest black woman decided to host the 2007 fundraiser for then-Democratic contender Barack…
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Lessons From the Great Compromiser
With the repeal of the controversial “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that prevented homosexual soldiers from serving openly in the U.S. military, ratification of the new START Treaty and a surprise 11th-hour passage of the 9/11 first responders’ health care bill, President Obama is being hailed as “the Great Compromiser.” But just a couple of…
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Closing Cabrini-Green
Sometimes, moving is a happy event. Sometimes it’s not. Last week, when Annie Ricks and five of her children left the 11th-floor apartment in the dilapidated, 15-story high-rise complex where she has lived for the past 22 years, it was a media event. And Ricks, the last tenant in Chicago’s notorious Cabrini-Green public housing project,…
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Why Jesse Jackson Jr.'s Win Won't Save His Career
In the immortal words of the great New York Yankee pundit Yogi Berra, “It was like déjà vu all over again.” Under a blinding media glare, yet another prominent American politician squirmed to sweep aside a damaging extramarital affair. This time it was Illinois Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr., deflecting questions about a two-year-old indiscretion with…
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The Root Cities: Chicago Then and Now
The Second City, the City of Broad Shoulders and the City That Works was Frank Sinatra’s “kind of town.” It is also my hometown. I came here with my mother when I was about 6 months old. Like countless thousands of others from the deep South in the late 1940s and early 1950s, we took…
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Getting Shot at in Chicago
Last week a 13-year old boy named Robert Freeman was shot 22 times while riding his bicycle in front of his home on Chicago’s far south side. Last night I almost became a statistic while taking my daily walk in another south-Chicago neighborhood not far from where Freeman was killed. For the past few months,…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
