After half a century, the March on Washington has moved into the historical record as a courageous but hardly radical event. It is widely remembered for Martin Luther King’s brilliant extemporaneous riffs on “I Have a Dream.” But even a peaceful assembly by “Negroes,” as black Americans were then known, was a dangerous idea in […]

Since his first year in office, President Obama has drawn scathing critiques from a handful of prominent black critics — mostly for his failure to pursue an explicit “black” agenda aimed at ameliorating the legacy of racism. Usually, I disagree with those critics, who are unrealistic about the limits of the presidency, unfair in their […]

Now that the U.S. Supreme Court’s hyper-conservative faction has neutered the Voting Rights Act, Republican officials around the country have re-energized their campaign to block citizens of color from voting. Florida Gov. Rick Scott surprised no one last week when he announced that he would resume a controversial and clearly partisan purge of the voting […]