Displaying more dignity and grace than most anyone else could have mustered under the circumstances, Haiti’s Ambassador to the United States, Raymond Joseph, offered a precise explanation of history to address the odious comments Pat Robertson made yesterday while men, women and children lay trapped in agony.

I am absolutely sick of people defending hate filled oratory.
Trent Lott’s comments “weren’t said with malice”.
Rush Limbaugh’s “just trying to rile people up”.
Both words and deeds count.
Think about it.

There was quite a dust up on the liberal interwebs yesterday when it was wrongly reported that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had declared he would have dissented in the landmark ‘Brown vs Board of Education’ case. As you may know the ‘Brown vs Board of Education’ decision was unanimous and it ended government sanctioned ’separate but equal’.
In truth, Scalia stated that he would have dissented from the majority in ‘Plessy v Ferguson’. ‘Plessy v Ferguson’ opened the way for Jim Crow and the institutionalization and reinforcement of racist …

In White Plains, New York a white teacher has apologized for attempting to teach about the horrors of slavery by binding the hands and feet of two black girls. One of the girls had volunteered for the misguided experiment, one had not. Truth is stranger and, at times like this, dumber than fiction. According to WCBS:
Christine Shand says it was a terrible experience for her daughter, Gaby, descended, like most Jamaicans, from slaves.
"She burst into tears, she was crying and she was horrified," Shand told CBS 2 HD.
In a social …

More information about Michelle Obama’s slave ancestry has been released to the public. Indeed it is an emblematic fact of our nation’s promise that some of our future first lady’s forefathers and foremothers spent their lives in bondage . But to me, what is most important about Michelle Obama’s family trajectory is that there was a strong emphasis on liberation through education:
Their documented passage begins with Jim Robinson, Michelle Obama’s great-great-grandfather, who was born about 1850 and lived as a slave, at least until the Civil War, on the sprawling …

December 2nd is UN Slavery Abolition Day and we should take notice. It is estimated that there are at least 27 million people enslaved around the world today. At 27 million, more human beings are in bondage than at any other time in history. According to the Christian Science Monitor:
Slaves are cheap these days. Their price is the lowest it’s been in about 4,000 years. And right now the world has a glut of human slaves – 27 million by conservative estimates and more than at any time in human …

On June 19, 1865, two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas with news that the Civil War had ended and those who had been slaves were now free. There are a number of accounts as to why freedom took so long to arrive in Texas:

In the promo for ‘Meeting David Wilson,’ you hear documentarian David A. Wilson make a jarring introduction: “Hello, David Wilson? My name is David Wilson, I believe your family once owned mine.” Let’s talk about race indeed.
‘Meeting David Wilson’ is a 90 minute documentary that follows David A. Wilson as he travels from his home in Newark to the plantation where his family was once enslaved and to Africa to reconnect with the ancestors. He does all this in an effort to answer a provocative question: “What’s wrong with …