inauguration

Here’s a sentence I never thought I’d write, at least not as soon as I am now compelled to write it: It may well be the case that the United States is on its way to electing a person of color as President. Make no mistake, I realize the way that any number of factors, racism prominently among them, could derail such a thing from coming to fruition.

In the year 1983 Ronald Reagan established Martin Luther King’s birthday as a national holiday and Vanessa Williams is the first African-American woman to win the Miss America title! Check out the rest of 1983 here…

From Laura Flanders at FireDogLake.com: On his first couple of days in office, Barack Obama has put an emphasis on transparency and the freedom of information. Indeed, one of his first acts was a directive to all government agencies urging them to “adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure.” A good first step? Yes. But […]

From All Things Considered on NPR: President-elect Barack Obama has been many things: lawyer, community organizer, politician — and writer. A panel of literary pundits, including Azar Nafisi, Rick Moody and Edwidge Danticat, assess his memoir Dreams from My Father and tell us what they think his writerly-ways might portend for his term in the […]

This was the year of Michael Jackson, Bryant Gumble and the extension of the 1965 Voting Rights Act!

From Michael C. Moynihan at ReasonOnline: For political artists such as Rosler, the past eight years have been boom years, providing much opportunity for outrage (for those who remember the Reagan-era New York art scene, this is hardly surprising). But what will become of the perpetually outraged artist in the event of an Obama administration? […]

The year 1981 saw many achievements in African-American literature and drama literature when Charles Fuller won an award for A Soldier’s Play and Toni Morrison released her hit novel Tar Baby.

From David Swerdick at TheRoot.com: They are black Republicans… A rapidly disappearing political subculture that seeks legitimacy by asserting that they are something different, something special—the other dark meat. They define themselves—with a quizzical ethos of inverse snobbery often mistaken for self-loathing—by what they are not: Al Sharpton, in need of affirmative action, or “like […]