Blacks | featured news

Vice President Joe Biden drew cheers from the nation's biggest civil rights group on Thursday with a fiery defense of President Barack Obama's record, and he warned that the election of Republican Mitt Romney could reverse years of economic and civil rights gains for blacks.

As governor of Michigan, George Romney pressed an aggressive agenda on the issue, putting himself at odds with Republican Party leaders. His son presents a different figure. In 1963, an explosive year in the quest for civil rights, George Romney appeared unannounced in the mostly white suburb of Grosse Pointe and marched to the front of an anti-segregation demonstration to stand beside black leaders.

New polls show a distinct split in how Americans view the shooting death of Trayvon Martin. Some groups, including blacks, women, and Democrats, are more likely to see race as a key factor.

More than 40 years after the federal government enacted fair-housing legislation and the Great Migration of blacks from the South began to ebb, residential segregation in metropolitan America has been significantly curtailed, according to a study released Monday.

At the height of his career in Congress, Newt Gingrich used to tell audiences that renewing American civilization was "the central challenge of the rest of our lives." But before Gingrich could deliver his grand new theory of American civilization to the public in a 1993 speech, his deeply divisive racial stereotypes would need to be removed.

Blacks have historically suffered the income inequality and job scarcity that the Wall Street protesters are now railing against. Perhaps black America’s absence is sending a message to the Occupiers: “We told you so! Nothing will change. We’ve been here already. It’s hopeless.”

Promising that “change can come if you don’t give up,” President Obama, the man who is perhaps the biggest beneficiary of the civil rights movement, on Sunday called on Americans to use the memory of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to help push for progress in today’s economically tough times.

In a fiery summons to an important voting block, President Barack Obama told blacks on Saturday to quit crying and complaining and "put on your marching shoes" to follow him into battle for jobs and opportunity....

U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) called on President Obama on Thursday to pay more attention to black Americans, saying she and other members of the Congressional Black Caucus are "not just frustrated with the president - communities are hurting."

James Ford Seale, who in 1964 committed one of the most gruesome acts of the segregationist South when he tied blocks to the feet of two black teenagers and threw them still breathing into the Mississippi river, has died – for the second time.