Free Republic

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the venerable civil rights organization founded by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and his lieutenants, may be in its death throes. Its recent convention found the SCLC circling the drain, as members thought seriously about making a convicted felon their president. The SCLC is beset by contentiousness, conflicting agendas and competing egos, bickering so divisive that its last president, Martin Luther King III, threw up his hands and quit last November. Last week's annual gathering ended with a vote to keep its 82-year-old caretaker president, Fred Shuttlesworth. But neither Shuttlesworth nor any younger successor...

Rethinking The Reagan Years How I learned to stop protesting and love Reagan. By Joe R. Hicks I was an active participant in the Left's many causes and activities during the troubled era of the Sixties — and continued to pursue that agenda well into the 1980s and early '90s. Ronald Reagan was often the subject of our savage attacks because he, and the burgeoning conservative political movement he led, was like Kryptonite to our agenda of radical "social change." When I later became a part of the nation's civil-rights establishment, I argued that Reagan's policies were a disaster for...

When small-town Mayor Jason West started presiding over gay weddings, he saw it as nothing short of "the flowering of the largest civil rights movement the country's had in a generation." "The people who would forbid gays from marrying in this country are those who would have made Rosa Parks sit in the back of the bus," said the Green Party mayor of New Paltz, N.Y. West's words have a strong resonance for gays and lesbians who feel their rights are being denied, but for blacks who worked to end racial discrimination in the 1950s and '60s, the reaction is...

<p>Representatives from the clergy, the Mississippi Black Caucus and two civil rights groups unleashed a blistering attack on caucus head Rep. Phillip West Wednesday for switching his position on Judge Charles Pickering's nomination to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.</p>