Arizona Rep.: Blacks Better Off as Slaves

Founding Fathers had abolition in mind, says pundit

(NEWSER) - Glenn Beck today put his spin on a provision in the US Constitution that once counted slaves as three-fifths of a person, painting it as a tool by which Northern abolitionists meant eventually to outlaw the practice. An African-American caller took issue with Beck’s reliance on the founding fathers, reminding him that many owned slaves, and had inserted the three-fifths measure. Beck’s response: More»

Rev. Augustus Tolton led Chicago mission

(NEWSER) - Chicago’s Roman Catholic leader is making a case that the faith’s first known black priest in the US should be made a saint, with Cardinal Francis George today asking a commission to bring the Vatican evidence of the “heroic virtues” of the Rev. Augustus Tolton. Tolton, the son of escaped slaves, was ordained in Rome in 1886—no American seminary would do it—and sent to head a mission for Chicago’s African-American community in 1894. More»

Genealogist fills in gaps of her lineage

(NEWSER) - Michelle Obama can trace her lineage to a female slave sold as a young girl from a South Carolina plantation and sent to Georgia. As a teenager, Melvinia Shields became impregnated by a white man, possibly her master, and those two are the great-great-great grandparents of Michelle. A genealogist working with the New York Times uncovered the details, revealing more about the first lady’s family history than even she herself knew growing up. More»

Time for the president to break his long silence on America's racial divide

(NEWSER) - President Obama is taking so much heat from opponents wrongly convinced that he's keen on redistributing white America's wealth to African-Americans that he might as well go ahead and do it, Naomi Klein writes in the Guardian. Obama's administration has been pursuing "race-neutral" policies that do nothing to close the massive gap in wealth between races, Klein argues, so much so that it's starting to look like he's "turned his back on black America." More»

(NEWSER) - President Obama toured the Cape Coast Castle in Ghana today, a shipping-off point for African slaves to America, Reuters reports. He saw the monument as a reminder. “As painful as it is,” the president said, “I think that it helps to teach all of us that we have to do what we can to fight against the kinds of evils that sadly still exist in our world, not just on this continent but in every corner of the globe.” More»