[F]or Black America, the police state is the daily reality of arbitrary, relentless stops on the streets of their own neighborhoods, or in the hallways of their own public housing projects.

The first men, women and children to be enslaved by whites in New England were Native American prisoners of war doled out as favors to other tribes who had allied themselves with the settlers’ cause, or to white soldiers who fought with some distinction in those wars.

Supporters of a prominent Harvard University black scholar who was arrested at his own home by police responding to a report of a break-in say he is the victim of racial profiling.

But there’s one other thing that dozens of members of newsaxon.org, a white supremacist social networking website, have in common: They proudly identify themselves as active-duty members of the U.S. armed forces.

Wells Fargo loan officers guided minorities toward high-rate mortgages and joked that they were "riding the stagecoach to hell" for routinely steering prime-loan-qualified customers toward subprime loans, according to sworn declarations by two former employees, filed in federal court this week.

"She really was indomitable," said Archbishop Desmond Tutu yesterday. "She used to visit Robben Island at the time when Nelson Mandela and others were held there." He said that "just by being stroppy" she was able to effect change. He added: "We owe her an enormous, enormous debt ... She was a powerhouse against apartheid."

The Government Accountability Office yesterday condemned the U.S. Department of Agriculture's approach to resolving hundreds of discrimination complaints brought by minority employees and black farmers, and urged Congress to consider appointing an oversight board to review civil rights concerns at the agency.

Nearly a decade after the Agriculture Department agreed to settle a discrimination suit brought by black farmers, one of the largest payouts in U.S. history at almost $1 billion so far, the department has yet to develop a system to adequately address hundreds of other bias complaints from farmers and its own employees, the Government Accountability Office said this week.

Minorities are more likely than white patients to rate their health care as fair or poor, a view that is particularly true among Chinese-Americans, Vietnamese-Americans and blacks born in Africa.

Johnnie Carr spent the rest of her days challenging segregation and was on a personal mission to end racial strife in her hometown.

The Bush administration wants Congress to thwart a plan to give thousands of federal crack cocaine offenders a chance to marginally reduce prison sentences that are a hundred times more severe than those meted out for powder cocaine offenses.

President Bush’s threat to veto a bill intended to improve health care for the nation’s American Indians is both cruel and grossly unfair.

Ron Paul is not the plain-speaking antiwar activist his supporters believe they are backing -- but rather a member in good standing of some of the oldest and ugliest traditions in American politics.

Legacy preferences in college admissions — the nepotistic advantages given to the children of alumni — are indefensible, of course.

A senior U.S. counterterrorism official who has been battling his superiors at the Federal Bureau of Investigation over alleged ethnic discrimination says the bureau is trying to silence him ahead of speech he planned to deliver on internal problems facing the agency.

There are many ways to lose a Supreme Court case, and by the end of an argument that was before the court on Wednesday, the Democrats who were challenging Indiana’s voter-identification law appeared poised to lose theirs in a potentially sweeping way, with implications for many future election cases.

The world's largest military contractor will pay $2.5 million to a former avionics electrician who claims he was called the N-word, threatened with death and laid off after he reported racism on the job.

Black and Hispanic patients in pain are less likely than whites to get powerful painkillers from U.S. hospital emergency departments, but the reasons may go beyond sheer racial bias, researchers said on Tuesday.

But one significant milestone has gone strangely unnoticed: the 200th anniversary of Jan. 1, 1808, when the importation of slaves into the United States was prohibited.

During some of the bloodiest years of the drug wars of the 1980s, crack was seen as far more dangerous than powdered cocaine, and that perception was written into the sentencing laws. But now that notion is under attack like never before.

Federal officials began demolishing a local housing project Thursday despite protesters who angrily decried the destruction, saying the hurricane-ravaged city needs to preserve its affordable housing.

Study after study show that minorities are more likely than whites to get subprime mortgages, which are high-cost loans made to people with poor credit.

A House Judiciary subcommittee was the site of a sad spectacle the other day: John Tanner, who heads of the Justice Department’s voting section, trying to explain offensive, bigoted comments he made about minority voters.

All across the country, a new epidemic is threatening people's health -- the culprit is the closure of community hospitals and those most at risk are low-income and people of color.

When crack cocaine possession means 24 years in prison and manslaughter means only 3, you know something is seriously wrong with the U.S. criminal justice system.

The U.S. Supreme Court announced this week that it would hear a challenge to an Indiana law that requires people to show government-issued photo identification in order to have their votes counted.

This morning, I am entering the 67th day of a partial fast that I began early in the summer as my personal act of protest at the vicious damage being done to inner-city children by the federal education law No Child Left Behind.

Republican Gov. Sonny Perdue said the goal of the law "has never been, is not now and never will be, to try to keep people from voting."

Several of these former civil rights lawyers expressed fears that the Bush administration has tainted the division's legacy by rolling back voting rights enforcement, bringing few employment discrimination lawsuits on behalf of African-Americans and diverting appellate lawyers to immigration cases.

Blacks in the United States are imprisoned at more than five times the rate of whites, and Hispanics are locked up at nearly double the white rate, according to a study released Wednesday by a criminal justice policy group. The report by the Sentencing Project, a Washington-based think tank, found that states in the Midwest and Northeast have the greatest black-to-white disparity in incarceration. Iowa had the widest disparity in the nation, imprisoning blacks at more than 13 times the rate of whites.