News about homegrown and foreign terrorism receives a lot of broadcast media airtime and focused attention online. It has become a pervasive theme in the developing story of our 21st century lives. Still, it is not something with which most us can ever afford to become so comfortable that we take it for granted in the same way that we take doing the laundry or drinking a cup of coffee for granted. Nor should we. I almost refused to allow myself to believe the reports about the shooting Wednesday (June 17, 2015) at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC. Six women and three men shot dead by one Dylann Storm Roof. I almost succeeded in believing the massacre had not occurred so close to where I grew up in Savannah, Georgia. Then I reminded myself that denial of evident truth is also something we cannot afford to indulge in today's socially and politically tumultuous climate. Please click the link to read the full essay : Shifting Points of View and...

“He captured the spotlight of history precisely at the right time, and responded with a blueprint for what America could become if it trusted its democratic legacy… He was murdered. But his dream still excites our social and political imaginations. It beckons us to work, to realize the dream that America can indeed be a truly pluralistic society and that planet Earth can be a place in the universe where peace, justice, and freedom are the dominant ethos.” ––James M. Washington, Introduction to A Testament of Hope , The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr . August 28, 2013, will mark the 50th anniversary of the great 1963 March on Washington D.C. for Civil Rights and for Martin Luther King Jr.’s delivery of his now iconic “I Have a Dream” speech before a national audience.  Plans had long been underway to commemorate the event on Saturday, August 24, with a symbolic reenactment of the original march. Recent events, however, such as George Zimmerman’s ...

President Barack Obama standing with the Red Cross and the nation in the face of Hurricane Sandy's historic devastation . (Reuters photo by Larry Downing) As much as many of us prefer to believe we now live in a “post-racial America,” fairly staggering evidence continues to accumulate to the contrary. Former President Bill Clinton, Reverend Al Sharpton, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Huffington Post bloggers, and other public figures have spent  much of their time during the 2012 presidential election campaign sounding alarms against voter suppression targeting African Americans and Latinos. These proposed types of suppression have taken the form of newly-required photo IDs, the cancellation of early voting on the Sunday before the election , the requirement of a long-term address over a given period of time, and other recently-invented criteria. Moving beyond the immediate political implications of these attempts, Clinton has asked th...