The League of Iowa Human & Civil Rights Agencies

When Shelton Johnson was 5, his family took him to Berchtesgaden National Park in the Bavarian Alps. To this day, he remembers his sense of awe. “The mountains, the sky being so close — it affected me profoundly,” said Mr. Johnson, who now works as a ranger at Yosemite National Park in California. In 23 years on the job, Mr. Johnson, 52, has been equally struck by how few of his fellow African-Americans visit the national parks, Yosemite included. A few years ago, he decided...

A state judge has granted class-action status to a lawsuit in which Iowa is accused of discriminating against black state workers and applicants. The plaintiffs and the state both sought class-action certification.

In an order issued September 29, Judge Robert J. Blink ruled that the lawsuit brought by 32 current or former black state employees qualifies as a class action. “The court finds that joint or common interest exists among members of this class, that common q...

African American Experiences in the Economy: Recession Effects More Strongly Felt 

By: Rebecca Perron, AARP Knowledge Management

Source: AARP.org (February 2010)

While millions of Americans have experienced hard times during the economic recession, the environment for many African Americans age 45+ and their families h...

Teachers Suspended Over Role Model Choice 

By Jennifer Steinhauer

Published: March 4, 2010 (New York Times)

LOS ANGELES — His name has not been released, so it was not possible Thursday to ascertain what an elementary school teacher here was thinking when he pinned a photo of O. J. Simpson on the shirt of a second-g...

Two white suspects cleared in the death of a black man who was allegedly dragged beneath a vehicle are suing the Texas officials who kept them jailed for more than eight months. The federal lawsuit filed this week seeks at least $4 million for Shannon Finley and Ryan Crostley, once the main suspects in the 2008 death of their friend, Brandon McClelland.

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MSNBC's Chris Matthews says President Barack Obama has done so much to heal racial divisions that he "forgot he was black" while watching his State of the Union address. Those four words _ "forgot he was black" _ so instantly set the Twitter world afire that Matthews came back less than 90 minutes later Wednesday night to explain what he meant.

WASHINGTON — The White House installed a rare signed copy of the Emancipation Proclamation in the Oval Office on Monday, just in time for President Obama to mark his first Martin Luther King’s Birthday in office. Mr. Obama invited a small group of African-Americans, all octogenarians or older, and their grandchildren to visit with him and view the document, one of 48 “authorized copies” that President Abraham Lincoln signed in 1864.

It has been easy for people to forget in the decades since we lost the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that he was a passionate fighter for economic justice as well as civil rights. The two goals were as closely linked as the hydrogen and oxygen atoms in water. The historic gathering in 1963 at which Dr. King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech was officially called the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. And when Dr. King was murdered in Memphis in 1968, he had gon...

LAST week, the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, found himself in trouble for once suggesting that Barack Obama had a political edge over other African-American candidates because he was “light-skinned” and had “no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.” Mr. Reid was not expressing sadness but a gleeful opportunism that Americans were still judging one another by the color of their skin, rather than — as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whose legacy w...

Unemployment for African Americans is projected to reach a 25-year high this year, according to a study released Thursday by an economic think tank, with the national rate soaring to 17.2 percent and the rates in five states exceeding 20 percent.  Blacks as well as Latinos were far behind whites in employment levels even when the economy was booming. But throughout the recession, the unemployment rate has grown much faster for African Americans and Latinos than for whites, according to t...