Headliner

The number of Black-owned businesses increased by 60.5 percent to 1.9 million from 2002 to 2007, more than triple the national rate of 18.0 percent, the latest U.S. Census Bureau’s “2007 Survey of Business Owners” shows.

In December, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights released two briefing reports whose findings and recommendations some consider “dangerous.” The reports,

Some pundits contend that the immediate future of the Congressional Black Caucus is inextricably tied to the fate of its venerable leader, Charles B. Rangel, D-N.Y. The House of Representatives voted 333 to 79 on Dec. 2 to censure Rangel for 11 ethics violations, rejecting the lesser “reprimand” he and his supporters sought.

Amid all the gnashing of teeth over the paucity of minorities in science, technology, math and engineering (STEM) careers, one organization is tackling the problem by reaching into inner-city high schools nationwide.

As important as it is for Black empowerment in America, President Barack Obama’s first year in the White House led to no appreciable impact on the lives of many African-Americans, the National Urban League says in its latest assessment of the economic and social state of the country’s Black community.

On June 2, some 650 business executives, elected officials, nonprofit leaders and high-profile New Yorkers — longtime partners, friends and constituents of Abyssinian Development Corporation — joined parents and kindergarten-through-twelfth-grade students in Shepard Hall at the City College of New York for ADC’s Harlem Renaissance Day of Commitment Leader-ship Breakfast.

Very few American politicians have been in office long enough to say they have defeated both a father and a son. Congressman Charles Rangel can make that claim having edged the redoubtable Adam Clayton Powell Jr. in 1970 and his son, Adam Clayton Powell IV, in 1994.

Inner-city companies attract 31 percent less growth capital than average U.S. businesses, according to a report by Inner City Capital Connections, a partnership between the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City and Bank of America that educates inner-city businessowners about equity financing and connects them with providers of such financing.

In a nation wrestling with an obesity epidemic, almost one in four children are food insecure, with a striking disparity in the prevalence of food insecurity among Black children. Such is the state of affairs in the United States, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service.