Blogs

When the latest horrific act of excessive, out of control violence by a police officer against a young black girl at Spring Valley High School hit CNN and the social media loops, did you think about withdrawing from the fight, exhausted and overwhelmed by it all? Did you want to distance yourself from the pain and anger? Or did you ask yourself how you would have been able to deal with t...

I know that I am not the only one that has noticed the pattern. On Thursday, James Holmes, a 27-year old white man, was found guilty of the murder of 12 people (70 others were wounded) in a Colorado theater shooting in 2012. Dylan Roof, a 21-year old white man, has confessed to murdering in cold blood nine parishioners of Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina in June of thi...

I was in Baltimore most of this past week. The one day I wasn’t, I was in Missouri, talking to folks involved in the Ferguson protests for Michael Brown and addressing the St. Louis Chapter of the Association of Corporate Counsel about how to counter bias in the workplace and throughout the larger community. Yet I didn’t begin to fully appreciate the impact on me of the week’s events ...

I would have loved to see President Obama, the First Lady and their beautiful girls in Selma, Alabama linking arms with Rep. John Lewis and other brave civil rights pioneers who took that historic walk over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965. The presence of our African-American first family marking the anniversary of this triumphant struggle was incredibly poignant and inspiring in itself...

Black History Month is a time of reflection. This year I’ve been reflecting on my own black history and how it brought me back home to Baltimore. Growing up black, I used to think that at a certain point in my life I would go and help the kids in Africa. Maybe it was those kids on the commercials. They were black like me, but while things may have been lacking in my family, they were ...

I experienced many emotions watching the incredible motion picture, Selma, this past weekend. There was pride. There was pain for every blow and every death it took for our country to heed the call of the civil rights movement and grant Black Americans the right to vote. There was confusion watching the perpetrators of such violence and rabid resistance. How did Selma’s Sherriff Jim Clar...