Stateside

Washington, D.C. – The NAACP will kick off its 111th Annual Convention on Monday, August 3, 2020, with the Arts, Culture & Entertainment (ACE) Festival, powered by the NAACP’s Hollywood Bureau. Along with showcasing exclusive digital events and rising Black talent, the festival will feature a diverse set of speakers, artists, and actors who will touch…

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ABOVE PHOTO: Former Pa. Supreme Court Justice Cynthia Baldwin. (Insert Photo/Penn State University website)  HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — A Black woman who is a former justice on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has released a sworn affidavit that accuses the court’s chief justice, Thomas Saylor, of complaining to another judge about “her minority agenda.” Cynthia Baldwin, the…

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HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Pennsylvania’s governor says legislation to require that state government agencies continue processing public records requests during disasters is “ill-conceived and poorly drafted,” but he’s letting it become law without his signature. Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf announced late Sunday he will neither sign nor veto the legislation, which passed both legislative chambers…

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SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — Trustees of California State University, the nation’s largest four-year public university system, voted on Wednesday to make ethnic and social justice studies a graduation requirement. It would take effect in three years and would be the first change to the school’s general education curriculum in over 40 years, coming amid a…

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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump announced Wednesday that he will send federal agents into Chicago and Albuquerque, New Mexico, to help combat rising crime, expanding the administration’s intervention in local enforcement as he runs for reelection under a “law-and-order” mantle. Using the same alarmist language he has employed to describe illegal immigration, Trump painted…

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MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — A Minnesota judge on Tuesday lifted a gag order in the criminal case against four former officers charged in death of George Floyd, but said he would take a news media coalition’s request to make body camera footage more widely available under advisement. Even though the gag order was vacated, Hennepin County…

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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump is planning to deploy federal agents to Chicago and possibly other Democrat-run cities as he continues to assert federal power and use the Department of Homeland Security in unprecedented, politicized ways. DHS is slated to send about 150 Homeland Security Investigations agents to Chicago to help local law enforcement…

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By JAY REEVES SELMA, Ala. (AP) — John Lewis saw the line of Alabama state troopers a few hundred yards away as he led hundreds of marchers to the apex of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on March 7, 1965. Armed with gas canisters and nightsticks, the troopers were flanked by horse-riding members of…

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ATLANTA (AP) — Congressman John Lewis, a civil rights icon and the last of the Big Six civil rights activists led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., died Friday at age 80. He is being remembered by congressional colleagues, civil rights leaders and former presidents as a “titan” of the struggle against racial discrimination….

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By CALVIN WOODWARD WASHINGTON (AP) — People paid great heed to John Lewis for much of his life in the civil rights movement. But at the very beginning — when he was just a kid wanting to be a minister someday — his audience didn’t care much for what he had to say. A son…

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