Events this summer have further demonstrated a cruel irony of African American life in the glare of the nation’s first black presidency. Specifically, Barack Obama’s historic two administrations have been accompanied by brazen white supremacist reaction and widespread black alienation. Witness the recent fate of the Voting Rights Act and the George Zimmerman jury verdict.

Clarence Lang, Forum Organizer: Since the late 1970s, neoliberalism has emerged as the main political-economic organizing principle in the United States and globally. Characterized by deregulation, privatization, and economic austerity, neoliberal policies have promoted the devaluation of labor and the withdrawal of the state from social welfare provision.

I saw a fascinating documentary recently at a local film festival. The name of it is “A Band Called Death,” and it is scheduled for a wider release this summer

I first encountered The Black Scholar in the mid-1990s when I was an undergraduate seeking insight to the quandaries of campus race relations, a better comprehension of the conflicts internal to black student politics, and a more sophisticated way of understanding the duplicity of university administrators beyond just their racism.

It may be clichéd to remark that the 2008 presidential election of Barack Obama, and his historic re-election, were momentous events not only in U.S. history but also in the long march of African American history.

On August 28, 1963, more than 200,000 people converged at the Lincoln Memorial in a March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The assembly occurred in a period of heightened black freedom struggle that was most ferocious in the Deep South but also relentless across the Upper and Border South, Northeast, Midwest, and West Coast.