National

CHARLESTON, S.C. – Leaders of local civil rights organizations had been taking a wait-and- see approach to the April 4 North Charleston police shooting death of 50-year-old Walter Scott, but voiced concern that Scott was unarmed when he was shot and that police said Scott had run away from the officer attempting to arrest him. Officer Michael Slager was charged on Tuesday with murder after a video of the incident revealed he wantonly shot Scott in the back.

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.

If the Black residents of Ferguson, Mo., want to radically reform the political climate that encouraged police to disproportionately ticket, fine and arrest them to collect revenue for the city coffers, they’ll have to do more than embrace non-violent acts of civil disobedience and peaceful protests – they will have to vote.

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.