Free Republic

There are many people in our great land aggrieved over the idea that Hillary Clinton thinks Martin Luther King Jr. was not the hero of the civil rights movement. This idea seems so illogical that the only way to understand it is to approach it as a puzzle. After all, why would a white person running for president in 2008 dismiss the legacy of King near his birthday, which is celebrated as a national holiday, and right before a primary in a state with a large black vote? ... Why do people like op-ed columnist Bob Herbert, South Carolina Rep....

The Color of His Skin Imagine him white. Barack Obama, that is. Amidst all the glowing talk about the possibility of his becoming America's first black president in 2008, it's an interesting thought experiment to imagine whether Mr. Obama would elicit this swooning buzz if he were white. That is, let's imagine a white guy with all of Mr. Obama's pluses: crinkly smile, sincere concern for the little man, fine speech a couple of years ago about bringing the nation together, a certain charisma, wrote a touching autobiography. Let's call him Barrett O'Leary. I do not think Mr. O'Leary would...

September 11 has lent me one of the most nettlesome mental challenges I have ever encountered — seeking coherence in the leftist orthodoxy on what has happened since. For me, especially confusing is those who rue our not having met 9/11 with "pacifism." To wrap one's head around others' views and perceive how those views are compatible with intelligence and morality is an urgent task. But I have been just barely adequate to it when encountering a Berkeley professor who vehemently opposed our attacking Afghanistan, or another who thought that we should turn the other cheek to terrorist attacks. In...

As it quickly became clear that there was a certain demographic skew among the people stranded in New Orleans, journalists began intoning that Hurricane Katrina had stripped bare the continuing racial inequity in America. The extent to which this was hidden is unclear, actually. An awareness that a tragic disproportion of black Americans are poor has been a hallmark of civic awareness among educated Americans for 40 years now. The problem is less a lack of awareness than a lack of understanding. The publicly sanctioned take is that “white supremacy” is why 80% of New Orleans’s poor people are black....

While many people this month are focused on the controversy surrounding the 40th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, I have another civil-rights-related 40th anniversary on my mind. On Aug. 11, 1965, the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles broke out in flames on the nation's television screens. Many cherish the memory as the moment when the militant became mainstream in a "fed-up" black America, replacing the nonviolent, gradualist efforts of old-guard civil rights leaders. The Watts riot indeed shaped modern black American history more decisively than the Voting Rights Act. The question is whether it was in a...

WHEN I was growing up in the 70's, Ebony and Jet were always on the coffee table, along with the late, great Ebony Jr. for children. There always seemed to be a party going on in all three of them, which is just the way their creator John H. Johnson wanted it. He created Ebony in 1945 to show that "Negroes got married, had beauty contests, gave parties, ran successful businesses, and did all the other normal things of life." Ebony was still at it 60 years later when Mr. Johnson died this week - its 717th issue is on...

<p>So much for polls that had President Bush getting twice as many black votes as he did in 2000. In 2000 he got 8 percent of the black vote. This time, he got only 11 percent. Eighty-eight percent of the black vote went to John Kerry.</p>

Not African-American It's time we descendants of slaves brought to the United States let go of the term "African-American" and go back to calling ourselves Black -- with a capital B. Modern America is home now to millions of immigrants who were born in Africa. Their cultures and identities are split between Africa and the United States. They have last names like Onwughalu, Nwangwu and Senkofa. They speak languages like Wolof, Twi, Yoruba and Hausa, and speak English with an accent. They were raised on African cuisine, music, dance and dress styles, customs and family dynamics. Their children often...

IT’S TIME we descendants of slaves brought to the United States let go of the term “African American” and go back to calling ourselves Black — with a capital B. Modern America is home to millions of immigrants born in Africa. Their cultures and identities are split between Africa and the United States. They have last names like Onwughalu and Senkofa. They speak languages like Wolof, Twi, Yoruba and Hausa, and speak English with an accent. They were raised on African cuisine, music, dance and dress styles, customs and family dynamics. Their children often speak or at least understand their...

Dignity is all a black person in America has,” Harvard professor Cornel West solemnly told listeners during the kick-off episode of black pundit Tavis Smiley’s new NPR radio show. Just then, West was feeling bereft of his dignity, after a much-publicized meeting with new Harvard president Lawrence Summers. West’s new boss had questioned the worth of some of his celebrity prof’s recent career moves—writing and editing several lightweight non-academic books, recording a rap CD, and assisting Al Sharpton on his presidential bid. Perhaps, Summers suggested, it might be time to get back to serious scholarly work. West quickly ran to...

The guy seems worth listening to.

I was prepared not to like John McWhorter. After all, he's labeled by others as a conservative (although he calls himself a neo-conservative) and as such, I expected him to have horns and a tail. But the youngish-looking man who stepped off the elevator at the Omni Hotel looked like any other black man. Given his stature--he is associate professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley--I expected him to be arrogant or at least a little bit cocky. He was neither. While the presence of some black leaders can fill a room, McWhorter shied away from even...