Free Republic

For Stephanie Davis, who grew up with little, the military was a path to the American dream, a realm where everyone would receive equal treatment. She joined the service in 1988 after finishing high school in Thomasville, Georgia, a small town said to be named for a soldier who fought in the War of 1812. Over the course of decades, she steadily advanced, becoming a flight surgeon, commander of flight medicine at Fairchild Air Force Base and, eventually, a lieutenant colonel. But many of her service colleagues, Davis says, saw her only as a Black woman. Or for the white...

DETROIT - When longtime Detroit community advocate Frank McGhee watched two Republican canvassers vote against certifying election results in the majority Black city, he was furious. McGhee, 58, has spent more than two decades working with Detroit youth and educating them on the electoral process. He said it was “outrageous” to see hard-fought Black voter-mobilization efforts threatened. “I thought, these are the ultimate executioners, if you will, put in place so that quietly they could take what belongs to us,” he said. President-elect Joe Biden was in part powered to victory in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Georgia by Black voters,...

DETROIT - Every day feels like a raw wound for Omari Barksdale. His sister, Laneeka Barksdale, died of COVID-19 in late March in Detroit - and since then, so have more than 228,000 Americans. Many were Black Americans whose communities were disproportionately devastated by the virus. Omari Barksdale, a Black man, watched with alarm as the toll of the country’s racial injustice mounted. People of color bore the brunt of pandemic-related job losses. Police shot and killed Breonna Taylor inside her Kentucky home, and a Minneapolis police officer pressed a knee into George Floyd’s neck for nearly eight minutes as...