About bawtonyaaweathersbee

Count on Florida to concoct laws that have nothing to do with justice, but much to do with political expediency. It’s been that way for a while. In 2010, under the pretense of preventing voter fraud, the GOP-led Legislature and Gov. Rick Scott limited early voting hours and imposed other inconveniences that led to block-long […]

Whenever I think about the mostly-black, impoverished women who subjected themselves to Philadelphia physician Kermit Gosnell’s seedy abortion procedures, I don’t think about Pennsylvania. I think about Mississippi. The Magnolia State is the nation’s poorest. Thirty-seven percent of its residents are black. Next to the District of Columbia, it has the highest percentage of black […]

Ever since Adam Lanza, egged on by insanity and an itchy trigger finger, slaughtered 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. last December, the National Rifle Association and frightened parents have been calling for more police officers in schools. I say be careful what you ask for. I say […]

Three years ago, Heriberto Espino, the Afro-Cuban president of the Fernando Ortiz Foundation in Havana, talked to me and a group of black journalists about realities in Cuba. Racism, he said, is a problem. But, he said, Cubans want to fix the problem themselves. “We want to change it,” Espino said. “And we want you […]

I guess when it comes to cracking down on takers, apparently Tennessee lawmakers like Stacy Campfield and Vance Dennis can’t see the greedy corporations for all the needy kids. But chances are their warped lenses on reality are obstructing their view. Not long ago Campfield, R-Knoxville, and Dennis, R-Savannah, introduced legislation that would tie families’ […]

This wasn’t the turn history was supposed to take for Jennifer Carroll. Carroll, as many already know, became Florida’s first African American lieutenant governor in 2010. Had some misfortune befell Gov. Rick Scott, she could have wound up being the first black and first woman governor of the nation’s fourth most populous state. And even […]

Call it the stadium that got its name by way of the new Jim Crow. Scores of football players, many of them black, will be making money for Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Fla., by catching passes, making tackles, and scrambling into the end zone. And from the looks of things, those FAU Owls […]

Sometimes, I think we ought to dedicate Black History Month to reviewing the part about black pride. I say this because these days, it seems that a lot of us either missed that chapter or just decided to skip it altogether. That chapter was largely written in the 1960s and early 1970s when brown-skinned, Afro-sporting […]

I’m almost certain that Tonya Battle would have been perfectly fine with not having to look after another newborn on her shift. What she wasn’t fine with, though, was the racism that went along with that relief. Last October Battle, a black nurse working in the neonatal intensive care unit at Hurley Medical Center in […]

Joe Walsh must be buckling under the weight of all that Tea Party sanctimony he had a hand in heaping on everyone else. The former Illinois GOP congressman, who lost his seat last fall to Democrat and Iraq war veteran Tammy Duckworth, has apparently fallen on hard times. Since he lost his election – and […]

As we bask in the ascension of President Obama to his second-term, it’s easy to feel positive and giddy about the future of this country and black people’s possibilities in it. Especially since a Mitt Romney victory would have meant a Tea Party takeover and four years of backlash for us even daring to use […]

Is this the same NAACP that passionately backed President Obama’s health reform law? You know the law that stresses prevention as well as treatment? The one that, for many people, covers screenings for chronic diseases such as diabetes and heart disease – maladies that disproportionately plague black people? The one that also covers counseling for […]