Two educated Alpha Men break it down for the world to see.  Dr Wilmer Leon and Dr. Robert Brown discuss how to cope with the stress of a changing environment.  Click here to listen!

Heather Ferreira works in the slums of Mumbai, India, where she has watched thousands of women live under a “curse.”

The women she meets in the squalid streets where “Slumdog Millionaire” was filmed are often treated with contempt, she says. They’re considered ugly if their skin and hair are too dark. They are deemed “cursed” if they only have daughters. Many would-be mothers even abort their children if they learn they’re female.

Yet lately she says Indian women are getting another message from the emergence of another woman thousands of miles away. This woman has dark skin and hair. She walks next to her husband in public, not behind. And she has two daughters. But no one calls her cursed. They call her Michelle Obama, the first lady.

“She could be a new face for India,” says Ferreira, program officer for an HIV-prevention program run by World Vision, an international humanitarian group. “She shows women that it’s OK to have dark skin and to not have a son. She’s quite real to us.”

Those who focus on Michelle Obama’s impact on America are underestimating her reach. The first lady is inspiring women of color around the globe to look at themselves, and America, in fresh ways.

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In case you didn’t get a chance to see the great Johnny Cochran in action, you really missed something.  Johnny is no longer with us, but we are YourBlackWorld wanted to pay tribute to one of the most respected Black attorneys of all time.  Click the image below in order to see Johnny Cochran’s closing argument during the OJ Simpson Trial!

ROCK HILL, S.C. – Elwin Hope Wilson leans back in his recliner, a sad, sickly man haunted by time.

Antique clocks, at least a hundred of them, fill his neat ranch home on Tillman Street. Grandfather clocks, mantel clocks, cuckoos and Westministers, all ticking, chiming and clanging in an hourly cacophony that measures the passing days.

Why clocks? his wife Judy has often asked during their 49 years together.

He shrugs and offers no answer.

Wilson doesn’t have answers for much of how he has lived his life — not for all the black people he beat up, not for all the venom he spewed, not for all the time wasted in hate.

Now 72 and ailing, his body swollen by diabetes, his eyes degenerating, Wilson is spending as many hours pondering his past as he is his mortality.

The former Ku Klux Klan supporter says he wants to atone for the cross burnings on Hollis Lake Road. He wants to apologize for hanging a black doll in a noose at the end of his drive, for flinging cantaloupes at black men walking down Main Street, for hurling a jack handle at the black kid jiggling the soda machine in his father’s service station, for brutally beating a 21-year-old seminary student at the bus station in 1961.

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Dr Boyce Watkins

www.BoyceWatkins.com

I just saw an article in which Senator John McCain recently wanted to pardon Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champ in American history.  His actions confuse me, as McCain was one of the last holdouts on the Martin Luther King holiday a few years ago.  Also, McCain would not like Jack Johnson if he were alive today, for his spirit of defiance of America’s 400 year commitment to racism is similar to the one that scholars such as myself carry today.  In other words, we are his ideological grandchildren, and John McCain doesn’t like people like me.

I find men like McCain to be even more perplexing because they are the first to get in line to support symbolic gestures, such as pardoning a man who was convicted nearly 100 years ago, but are happy to endorse tougher sentencing laws and more prisons which incarcerate hundreds of thousands of Black men today.  It has been statistically proven that, beyond any doubt, Black males are more likely to be incarcerated for the same crimes, less likely to have adequate counsel and more likely to receive longer sentences for these crimes.  Now, we are in an era in which American corporations own stock in prisons and have a profit motive for excess incarceration, which is incredibly dangerous.  What’s worse, millions of families are destroyed by the justice system endorsed by John McCain, with these men finding insurmountable institutional hurdles to their re-entry into society.

I grow weary of those who chastise Black men for speaking out against racism, yet show up to sit in the front row of every Martin Luther King Day function.  There are even those in my own university who once hated Jim Brown and love him 30 years later.  All the while, they hate Boyce Watkins without realizing that he and Jim Brown come from the same tradition.   Such reactions show that history only repeats itself and that some Americans are quick to follow the lead created by their forefathers.

Perhaps dead Black men are the ones McCain is willing to pardon first, since they cause him the least trouble.  But the truth is that rather than hating us while we’re alive and honoring us in death, you’d be better off showing enough vision and open-mindedness to respect our point of view in the first place.   That is supposed to be what America is all about.

Rest in peace Jack Johnson.  I gave you a pardon long ago.

John Hope Franklin, one of the most prolific and well-respected chroniclers of America’s torturous racial odyssey, died of congestive heart failure Wednesday in a Durham, N.C., hospital. He was 94.

It was more than Franklin’s voluminous writings that cemented his reputation among academics, politicians and civil rights figures as an inestimable historian. It was the reality that Franklin, a black man, had seen racial horrors up close and thus was able to give his academic work a stinging ballast. Franklin was a young boy when his family lost everything in the Tulsa race riot of 1921. The violence was precipitated by reports that a black youth assaulted a white teenage girl in a downtown elevator. In the end more than 40 people died, mostly blacks, although some reports put the death total much higher.

Franklin was among the first black scholars to earn prominent posts at America’s top — and predominantly white — universities. His research and his personal success helped pave the way both for other blacks and for the field of black studies, which began to blossom on American campuses in the 1960s.

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Tennessee could join the list of Southern states that have apologized for slavery and racial discrimination under a resolution introduced by a Nashville lawmaker.

The General Assembly has started debate on a resolution that would express "profound regret" for enslaving African-Americans and setting up the Jim Crow segregation system. The resolution is meant to draw attention to the legacy of racism in Tennessee.

"This is a step toward racial healing," said the measure’s sponsor, Rep. Brenda Gilmore, a Nashville Democrat.

The measure passed its first vote Wednesday in a state Housesubcommittee. One representative, Chattanooga Republican Gerald McCormick, opposed the measure, saying that it would cause division within the state.

"There’s no one left alive today who either had slaves or was a slave," McCormick said. "I just feel like we’re opening up a wound, and I’d rather move forward rather than look backward."

Five former slave states — Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Alabama and Florida — have passed legislation in recent years apologizing for slavery. New Jersey has also passed legislation apologizing for its role in the slave trade.

Tennessee lawmakers have tackled the issue as well. Last year, Memphis Congressman Steve Cohen sponsored a resolution in the U.S. House of Representatives apologizing for slavery, and earlier in this decade, former Democratic state Rep. Henri Brooks of Memphis tried to get the Tennessee legislature to apologize.

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The 1968 Mexico City Olympics are best described and remembered in one photograph: Two black men, one gets the gold medal, the other the bronze, and both stand with a black fist raised in the air and their heads bowed. The picture sparked tons of controversy in a country divided and time period where tension between Black and white soared high.

Forty years later at the 2008 ESPN “ESPY Awards” the two men- Tommie Smith and John Carlos received the Arthur Ashe Award and the truth about their famous picture was revealed in a short video shown at the awards. 

Now, a new international movie- written, directed and produced by Matt Norman (nephew of Peter Norman, the 200m Olympic Silver Medalist pictured with Tommie Smith and John Carlos)- is coming out called “Salute” that ventures into the experience of the 1968 Olympics and the stories of all of the people involved after the historic event: