LETTER FROM
THE EDITOR
HUFFINGTON
07.28.13
The Undercurrent
N THIS WEEK’S issue, against the backdrop of the Trayvon
Martin case, the decision weakening the Voting
Rights Act, and Detroit’s bankruptcy, Howard Fineman looks
at how far we still are from true
equality for African-Americans.
We hear from many leaders in
the black community, including
Maryland Congressman Elijah
Cummings, who, as Howard puts
it, “has lived and seen the best
— and the worst — of what this
country means, offers and does
to a black man.” Rep. Cummings
takes us from his experiences of
childhood racism in South Baltimore all the way to his mother’s
recent encounter with the first
black president (“She called him
‘son’!”). It’s a story that reflects
just how far America has come,
but also how far we have to go.
ART STREIBER
I
Fifty years after Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr. stood on the
steps of the Lincoln Memorial and declared that AfricanAmericans were “still not free,”
Howard cites devastating statistics on everything from healthcare and education to poverty
and incarceration rates. As Rev.
Jesse Jackson puts it, “We have
LeBron. We have Jay Z. We have
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