The NAACP celebrates its centennial anniversary this year, but it is by no means sclerotic, nor on life support. In fact, the nation’s oldest and largest civil-rights organization is thriving, says its president and CEO, Benjamin Todd Jealous.

Within the broad operations of the NAACP, two youth-oriented programs give African-American teenagers resourceful options to the “thug life” and other less-wholesome distractions. One is the organization’s Youth & College Division; the other is the National Voter Fund.

The lineage of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is as old as African-Americans’ fight for freedom and equality. Notable army organizations opposed to racism and discrimination from the antebellum era to the beginning of the 20th century are the American Colonization Society, National Negro Convention Movement, the African Civilization Society and the American Negro Academy.

Recently, when Julian Bond, chairman of the NAACP, delivered the commencement address at Virginia State University and when he later testified in support of the Uniting American Families Act before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he was only doing the civil- and human-rights activities that have marked each milestone of his extraordinarily productive life.

With the U.S. economy in recession and forecast to show only very modest growth in the near future, sponsorships and donations that normally bolster philanthropic organizations run by professional athletes are coming under pressure.

Africa’s brain gain movement kicked into higher gear this year, with some of the continent’s most eminent scientists urging action from the world’s richest countries.

We should always be prepared to re-invent our lives, careers and spaces, for life is constantly evolving and we must flow in accordance. With the uncertainties of our floundering economy, many of us will have to carve out a new and exciting brand for ourselves to be successful today and in the future.

As risk appetite swells, investors are moving money to the smallest, most volatile markets in Africa and the Caribbean, lured by a growing sense that a recovery for the global economy is under way and investment in these frontier markets will reap hefty returns.

The Conference Board’s 2009 Annual Conference Dinner on May 27 wasn’t just  a gathering of corporate glitterati in the Greek-inspired grandeur of Cipriani Wall Street for a night of fine wine, fine food and back-patting.

Stories abound of bartering during the Great Depression.

Those who say that “race is history” have it exactly backward — history is race. America, scrambled, after all, spells “I am race.” And America is race — from its symbolism to its substance, from its founding by slaveholders to its rending by civil war, from Johnnie Reb to Jim Crow, from the Ku Klux Klan to Katrina.

People are seeking refuge from the volatility of the stock market by switching to bond funds.

Second of three articles.

In the run-up to the 2009 National Historically Black Colleges and Universities Week in Washington, D.C., this fall, the Thurgood Marshall College Fund is taking issue with a report by the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative Washington think tank, on the importance of graduation rates in high-schoolers’ decisions about which college or university to attend.

One month before the National Black Chamber of Commerce opened its 17th annual convention in Washington, D.C., Harry C. Alford, the chamber’s co-founder, president and CEO, sent out an eBlast in which he promised a “scrubbing” of the Department of Transportation’s disadvantaged business enterprise program during the three days of the convention.

For the few of you out there who haven’t heard of it, Twitter (http://twitter.com) is to social-networking Web sites like MySpace and Facebook what a haiku is to an epic poem. You open a Twitter profile page, select a username, and post very short messages of 140 characters or less (called “tweets”) on the site.

It looks lively for a class that started with dead women. It’s 6 p.m. on a Tuesday, the end of a workday for most people. But more than 50 women trickling into the gymnasium at Weeping Willow AME Zion Church on Milton Road, in Charlotte, N.C., are charged up and ready to go.

Throw away your scale. Too many of us get caught up in the ritual of daily weighing, fretting over the gain or loss of a pound or two.

Every year, for five days at the beginning of September, Brooklyn, N.Y., becomes the scene of one of the state’s biggest, most electrifying cultural extravaganzas as Caribbean-Americans literally take to the streets.

Your call is (not that) important to us by Emily Yellin, Kiss the sky by FArai Chideya, The last prejudice by David Rivera Jr, Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead