Ethel Payne: History maker, history follower and “First Lady of the Black Press”
One of the best parts of coming to Washington has been getting to know more about my grandma’s sister, Ethel Payne, who I always knew as Aunt Ethel.
She was one the first black woman White House correspondents, starting her career in Japan, publishing work that started in her journal and ended in the pages of [...]
Gay Bishop’s invocation not aired by HBO but moves quickly on YouTube
So Sarah Pulliam is a reporter for Christianity Today. We worked together a few years ago at the Colorado Springs Gazette. Sunday’s big “We Are One” concert at the Lincoln Memorial and that aired on HBO, starting with the invocation of Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson, Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire. It [...]
Buffalo Soldier on the Mall
I missed the concert at the Lincoln Memorial Sunday but wandered around the mall afterward and ran into Calvin Banks and his mare Carmen.
Banks has been riding horses since he was five-years-old and is a member of the mounted unit of the Maryland Buffalo Soldiers Horse Calvary. The unit goes to area schools to [...]
Civil rights leader and congressman delivers sermon at Shiloh Baptist, a church founded by former slaves
On the Sunday ahead of Martin Luther King Day and Barack Obama’s inauguration, I went to Shiloh Baptist Church on 9th St in Washington. Today it’s a church of hundreds of people but it was founded by 21 former slaves in 1863.
The church is led by Rev. George Wallace Smith but Congressman John Lewis delivered [...]
New economic stimulus plan: sell as much Obama schwag as you can
Hope. Inspiration. Brighter future. Change the world, blah blah blah. What continues to amaze me is the amount of money people are making on Barack Obama’s name and image. There have been plenty of jokes that the Kool-Aid’s been passed around among excited or obsessed Obama supporters but now its reaching critical levels of [...]
Kerner Commission 40 years ago and today: problems and solutions for America’s inner city poor and what Obama can do about it
The last time there was a Democratic majority of this kind in national politics was in the 1960s in Lyndon Johnson’s administration. Johnson would pass more legislation then almost any other president in American history. It would include Medicare, civil rights laws and the War on Poverty. But the Great Society, a sort of new [...]
