National

In the wake of the tragic death of Freddie Gray and the protests that followed in Baltimore, Black civic leaders continue to call for wholesale changes in policing and an end to police brutality in urban and predominately Black communities across the nation.

As education, jobs, and the national and global economy go digital, people without broadband (high-speed Internet) access risk being left behind.

Keeping her promise to ensure, “both strength and fairness, for the protection of both the needs of victims and the rights of all” in the criminal justice system, Attorney General Loretta Lynch traveled to Baltimore Tuesday to meet with city officials, law enforcement and community stakeholders to encourage closer ties between police and the residents that they are sworn to protect.

Baltimore’s curfew has been lifted, the officers have been charged, and Freddie Gray has been laid to rest. But the underlying causes of the protests around his homicide remain.

The NAACP has congratulated Loretta Lynch on her confirmation as the 83rd U.S. Attorney General. Lynch makes history as the first African American woman to hold the highest federal law enforcement position in the country.

Police have killed at least 369 people in the first four months of 2015, with 103 Black Americans – 28 percent – making up a disproportionate number of the victims, according to Ferguson protester project, Mapping the Police.

Black women working full time earned just 64 cents for every dollar White men made in 2013, according to a new report by the Center for American Progress (CAP).

North Charleston Branch NAACP President Ed Bryant said Thursday the April 4 shooting death of 50-year-old Walter Scott by a North Charleston police officer is indicative of the culture of abuse that exists in the department when it comes to Blacks.

A new economic report points out that even if the U.S. economy is now recovering, it has not reached the Black community, especially locally.

Black women are the only group that has not recovered the jobs they lost in the recession. Five years into national recovery, the unemployment rate for Black women has even risen a little since December, from 8.2 percent to 9.2 percent.

With no federal unemployment insurance and rapidly disappearing state coverage, the percentage of people benefiting from unemployment insurance is at its lowest level in more than three decades, according to a report by According to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a Washington, D.C.-based think tank focused on low- and middle-income families.

The report said that fewer Blacks are falling victim to violent crimes and a lower number of Black high school students are carrying weapons, which had a positive affect on the social justice index. The report also credited the Affordable Care Act and a decline in binge drinking for helping to improve the health index.

However, the report found that gaps in unemployment and homeownership widened.

As Eric Holder ended his tenure as U.S. Attorney General, he said, “The troubling reality is that we lack the ability right now to comprehensively track the number of incidents of either uses of force directed at police officers, or uses of force by police,” he said, at a Martin Luther King Jr. Day event. “This strikes many – including me – as unacceptab

Greek Life at the University of Minnesota spent Tuesday working to assure the community it does not condone the actions of fraternity members at the University of Oklahoma after a video was released over the weekend showing OU fraternity members on a party bus chanting racially offensive phrases.

As Washington lawmakers, local officials and activists prepare to march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge to observe the 50th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday” in Selma, Ala., some civil rights leaders want them to remember that voting rights are still under attack.

A very public conflict between the Bridge Crossing Jubilee, Inc., the local group that has been commemorating the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery March for more than four decades, and the largely White-run The Faith & Politics Institute, a Washington-based group that had organized competing marches in Selma and Montgomery on the weekend commemorating the 50th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” has been resolved with both groups agreeing to participate in a single march in Selma, a coalition of organizations has announced.