Features

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

What is inflation? What is deflation? We’re hearing more about inflation and deflation these days. It’s as if the economy were balanced on a seesaw, tilting one way and then the other. But what are the true definitions — and consequences — of these terms?

Members of the 2009 class of TNJ’s “40 Under Forty Dynamic Achievers” can boast that their class — the twelfth in the history of the “TNJ 40 Under Forty” — comes in the first year of the first Black presidency of the United States, a year when the bar in Black achievement was hoisted to historic heights.