Feature – Walter Mondale: The Civil Rights Law We Ignored. Fifty years ago on April 11, Congress enacted the Fair Housing Act, the last of the three great civil rights laws of the 1960s. The law was Congress’s effort to remedy a great historical evil: the large-scale exclusion and isolation of blacks from white communities. In the Jim Crow South, white and black citizens were kept apart to confirm and reinforce the idea of white superiority. Residential segregation accomplished the same result elsewhere, but on a much larger scale. The Fair Housing Act was intended to prevent and reverse all this. Read more  Also see, HUD Long Neglected These Residents. Now As They Move Out, Some Feel HUD Let Them Down Again. 

Kept Out : For people of color, banks are shutting the door to homeownership. Fifty years after the federal Fair Housing Act banned racial discrimination in lending, African Americans and Latinos continue to be routinely denied conventional mortgage loans at rates far higher than their white counterparts. Read more 
Freedom for Every Citizen :The missed opportunity of the Kerner Report. The report urged President Lyndon Johnson to couple dramatic increases in funding for job creation, housing, education, and other public services with reforms to policing, media coverage, and political power in American cities—nearly all of which was ignored by an administration facing increased pressure from both right and left. Read more 
The Radicalization of American Football. A conversation with Malcolm Jenkins, the political activist and Super Bowl champion behind the Players Coalition. Read more 

Joan Baez Reveals ‘Surprise Dimension’ of New ‘Civil War’ Video. The video features dancers in 19th century garb in a mix of contemporary photographs and historical portraits of black Civil War soldiers and slaves which are projected onto the screen and their bodies as they move to a song, song off her latest album, Whistle Down the Wind.  Watch the video 

The preacher who used Christianity to revive the Ku Klux Klan. It was approaching midnight on Oct. 16, 1915, when Methodist preacher William Joseph Simmons and at least 15 other  men climbed Stone Mountain in Georgia. Beneath a makeshift altar glowing in the flickering flames of the burning cross, they laid a U.S. flag, a sword and a Holy Bible. Read more 

After MLK’s Death, Coretta Scott King Went To Memphis To Finish His Work.  Coretta Scott King, center, accompanied by the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, her children, and singer Harry Belafonte, leads a march in Memphis to honor her husband who was assassinated four days earlier. Read more 

Democrats Shouldn’t Give in to White Racism. The idea that the Democratic Party should back off its commitment to civil rights is as misguided as it is ugly. Read more 

Black And Latino Children Are Often Overlooked When It Comes To Autism. ASD affects people of all races and ethnicities, but research shows that African-American and Latino children with autism are diagnosed at older ages than white children, giving them less of an opportunity for proper intervention and treatment. Read more 
California’s Higher Ed Diversity Problem. In 1996, right after voters in California banned affirmative action in employment and college admissions, minority student enrollment at two and four-year institutions plummeted. What has happened since though, is pretty remarkable. Read more 

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