Holder Determined to Challenge Voter-Suppression Laws

Featured at The Root

North Carolina went from being the model of a voter-friendly state to the poster child for voting restrictions, in one session of a Republican-dominated state legislature.

 Now, the battle over sweeping new laws passed this year is in the courts, with challenges from the Justice Department and civil rights groups, with crucial midterm elections on the line and the country watching.
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Dec222013 TAGS: , , ,

Kamala Harris: Focused on Job, Not SCOTUS

Featured at The Root

From advocating for health care reform to helping broker a settlement in the foreclosure crisis, California attorney general Kamala Harris has been as out-front on issues as she has in her vocal backing of Barack Obama. “I’ve been supporting the president for a long time; he’s been supporting me for a long time.”

A pioneer in her current position as well as in her previous post as district attorney of San Francisco, the Howard University graduate is the daughter of an Asian-Indian mother, a breast cancer specialist, and a Jamaican-American father, a Stanford economics professor. Harris said she grew up “surrounded by a bunch of adults who spent full time marching and shouting about this thing called justice.”

Harris spoke with The Root about issues, from prison reform to marriage equality.

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Nov032012 TAGS: , , , ,

DNC Helped Recapture Charlotte’s Magic

Featured at The Root

Mayor Anthony Foxx is exhausted, but in a good way, just like his city. Though last week’s Democratic National Convention didn’t run exactly as planned — turns out neither party is great at forecasting the weather — the sudden storms that periodically pummeled Charlotte, N.C., didn’t dampen the spirit of the celebration heading into a tough November political race. After Democrats chose Charlotte, there were questions about the city’s ability to pull off such a major event.

At the time, Foxx, 41, knew that the expected 35,000 visitors – national and international leaders, media and delegates — would be judging him as well. Charlotte’s second African-American mayor, who touted his city as the perfect pick, has been tagged as a rising political star. Sitting in an empty council chamber in the government center, Foxx was tired when he spoke with The Root on a recent Friday afternoon about his own future and the November chances of the president and friend he supports. That morning Foxx; his wife, Samara; and their two children, Hillary and Zachary, had said their goodbyes and posed for pictures at the North Carolina Air National Guard Base near Charlotte Douglas International Airport before President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama departed on Air Force One.

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Sep112012 TAGS: , , , ,

Why We’re Moving Back South

Featured at The Root

Thomas Clark was one of those committed New Yorkers. “For me it was the whole urban dynamic of being in a big city, being in the financial center of the world,” said the former New York state banking official and onetime president and CEO of Carver Federal Savings Bank. Commuting into Manhattan from his White Plains, N.Y., home, the self-described “little guy from Lackawanna, N.Y.,” took advantage of every social and cultural opportunity and “exposure to so many different people.”

 Now, Clark is content with a few visits back a year. Drawn by the cost of living, quality of life and the weather, the 67-year-old Clark moved to Charlotte, N.C., when he retired in November 2008. He’s not alone. “Most of the people I’m meeting are from somewhere else,” he said.

Clark is part of what is being called the “reverse migration” of African Americans from the North to the South, a trend that was starkly reflected in the 2010 U.S. Census data. According to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, between 2000 and 2009, most of the big metro areas with the largest growth in the African-American population were in the South. “Economic progress, cultural ties and an emerging black middle class have driven greater numbers of blacks to prosperous Southern metropolitan areas like Atlanta, Dallas, Houston and Raleigh,” according to analysis by William Frey, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, with losses in states such as Illinois and Michigan.

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Sep232011
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