By State Representative, Leon D. Young Thirty-two of the thirtythree developed nations have some form of universal health care, with the United States being the lone exception. All that changed last year on March 23, 2011, when President Barack Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) into law or so we thought. [...]

From Selma to Madison By Senator, Lena C. Taylor Nearly half a century ago on “Bloody Sunday,” police officers and militia with billy clubs, tear gas, boots, fists, and attack dogs brutally assaulted non-violent marchers who were demanding the right to vote. In Selma, Alabama, our grandmothers in “Prayer Clothes” did not stop protesting when [...]

We did it! We won. And I really mean “We”. With God’s guidance and your help, the City of Milwaukee elected me the first Black City Treasurer, and the first Black elected to a citywide executive office ever. It was indeed a milestone. I previously wrote an open letter to the community when the media [...]

By Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr. NNPA Columnist The new forensic voice analysis of the desperate sound of the pleading cry for help captured on the 911 tape recording on that tragic night of the murder of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida back on February 26, 2012 is just the latest piece of evidence of [...]

By Senator, Lena C. Taylor April is national Sexual Assault Awareness Month (SAAM), and I would like take this opportunity to speak with my constituents and all my readers about the national problem of sexual violence. I understand this will be a sensitive topic hitting close to home for some members of my audience, and [...]

By State Representative, Leon D. Young There were a number of shocking revelations in the Trayvon Martin case last week, and none seem to bolster George Zimmerman’s claim of self-defense. Moreover, these new developments now cast a serious cloud of complicity over the state attorney’s office and the Sanford Police Department. The first revelation that [...]

“You been took. You been hoodwinked. Bamboozled. Led astray. Run amuck.” Malcolm X Submitted by Curtiss Harris Somewhere somebody is either laughing or crying at how far Black America has come and how far we have to go. Our plight is not just measured by how many raging rivers of oppression we must cross but [...]

By State Representative, Leon D. Young In 1955, the nation became transfixed with the brutal murder of Emmett Till. Till was a Black fourteen-year-old from Chicago, Illinois. The youth had been sent to Money, Mississippi by his mother, Manie Till, to spend the summer with his uncle and some other relatives. One day during a [...]

By Senator, Lena C. Taylor Every ten years, legislative and congressional district boundaries are redrawn to account for population shifts reflected in the U.S. Census. Although those redrawn lines can give one party tremendous advantage over the other, the process has become a widely accepted and, in most cases, honorable undertaking. In our great state [...]

By Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr. NNPA Columnist Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. years ago once said, “Peace is not the absence of war, it is the presence of justice.” How true whether it is in a remote village today in Kandahar, Afghanistan where the senseless murder-massacre of nine innocent children under the age of [...]