invisible blog

Links to news that matters to you.

1. Thirty years ago the Mormon church received what they called “a revelation from God” which, they claimed, finally permitted them to have Black members. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch looks back on the decision; and describes reasons for the increasing numbers of Black Mormons.
2. Barack Obama has resigned his membership of the Trinity United Church of Christ, an issue which has dogged his campaign for months now. The New York Times reports that Obama has refused calls to denounce the church, and said instead that his “resignation was not a matter of political convenience, but rather that he had reached the point where neither he nor Trinity’s pastors and congregants could worship in peace.”
3. The Los Angeles Times covers the reactions of Obama’s former congregation. Their anger was not directed at Obama but at the media; the last straw was the coverage of a recent sermon at Trinity that “ridiculed Obama’s Democratic rival, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, as a white elitist who felt entitled to the presidential nomination”.
4. Black America Web believes that Barack Obama is “sitting on a stash of superdelegates” that he plans to “roll out strategically”. Part of the reason is that the Obama campaign believes releasing the names all at once would be “disrespectful” to Hillary Clinton.
5. And the Austin Weekly believes that Hillary Clinton is refusing to drop out of the race not for political advantage but as a “matter of principle”. She may not win the nomination, the article says, but she has “earned the right to lose it her way”.
6. Perhaps as many as twenty thousand African-American men marched through the streets of St. Louis on Sunday, reports KSDK St. Louis, in what was described as a “Call to Oneness”.
7. When the Boston Celtics last played the Los Angeles Lakers for the NBA championship, Boston was a divided city racially, and that anger was reflected on its streets, where young Black men wore Lakers jerseys as an act of defiance. The Boston Globe reflects on how much that has changed.
8. The Democratic National Committee last week chose 55 blogs out of hundreds of applicants to cover the national convention in Denver. Not one of them prominently features African-American voices. The San Francisco Chronicle discusses the reaction, and the larger issues at stake.
9. The Virginian-Pilot profiles pioneering African-American vintners who’ve set up a vineyard outside Charlottesville called Sugarleaf. The business is no longer all-white, but “the Association of African American Vintners counts fewer than a dozen wineries owned by African Americans in the United States”.
10. The Baltimore Sun lists six new books to read over summer by African-American novelists.