Recent polls indicate that white and black Americans believe race relations are bad and nearly half think they are getting worse. In a New York Times/CBS poll just over 60 percent of whites and 68 percent of blacks take this view – a dramatic increase from surveys conducted just after Obama’s first election victory.   Interestingly, while only 37 percent […]

Early on April 3, 1865 shortly before Union troops entered Richmond, Richard Gill Forrester, 17-year-old free African American, ran to the Virginia State Capitol and raised the US (Union) flag. Four years earlier, when Virginia seceded from the Union, Forrester, who worked as a page at the Capitol, rescued the flag and hid it safely in his home after he […]

Across the globe humanity is on the move on a vast scale, driven by war, terrorism and religious persecution as well as the desire for a better life. A UN report released this week puts the number of displaced people at 60 million. The total number of migrants reached 232 million in 2013. This number will surely escalate and most […]

Twenty years ago Richmond was a city “starkly divided along racial lines” and “congenitally resistant to change of any kind,” according to Virginia Senator Tim Kaine, who joined the city council in 1994. He went on to become mayor, lieutenant governor, and then governor. African Americans had won control of the city council in 1977, unsettling the white establishment, now […]

History is complex and ambiguous. No one is more aware of this truth than John Franklin, a senior manager at the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. Franklin’s ancestors were taken to Oklahoma as slaves of Native Americans. In 1831, thousands of Cherokees, Muscogees, Seminoles, Chickasaws, and Choctaws were forcibly relocated from their homelands in southeastern […]

One of the most memorable moments in the film Selma shows the civil rights activist Annie Lee Cooper (played by Oprah Winfrey) along with other peaceful demonstrators standing at the steps of the Selma courthouse demanding the right to vote. Sheriff Jim Clark pokes her with his nightstick at which point Cooper punches him. She is tackled and thrown to […]

President Obama thanked Pope Francis for his role in bringing the US and Cuba together. He said his “moral example shows us the importance of pursuing the world as it should be, rather than simply settling for the world as it is.”A mark of moral leadership is holding up a vision and encouraging others to overcome their differences to embrace […]

True conservatives should be at the forefront of demands for changes in law enforcement recruiting and training methods and in procedures by prosecutors in the wake of controversial police actions and decisions by grand juries. Rand Paul is one of the few leading Republicans who are speaking out unequivocally against flagrant examples of abuse of government power. Instead, some Republicans […]

In contact sports if you play scared you will get hurt. And in the mid-term elections the Democrats played scared.  Yes, Republicans worked shamelessly to suppress the vote in Texas, North Carolina and other states. Yes, the Koch brothers and others flooded key campaigns with money. And yes, some irresponsible voices played on fears of the electorate with wild statements […]

This month we celebrated the life of a great community builder and social entrepreneur. John Cotton Wood, who died at the age of 97, lived every moment to the fullest in the belief that every person could make a difference. He and his wife, Denise, who died a few years ago, provided a model for building trust and connecting divided […]