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Saving the Rosenwald Schools:
Preserving African American History

Diane Granat

Highland Park in Prince George's County, Maryland, is a working-class neighborhood of aging cottages and tiny churches just down the road from FedEx Field, the home of the Washington Redskins, a billion-dollar football franchise. Every Sunday the Redskins are in town, the stadium's luxury boxes fill up with the area's movers and shakers: wealthy entrepreneurs, prosperous lobbyists, the nation's political leaders.

Millennial Men: The Product of Mass Marketing,
Technology and Testosterone

Rita Kempley

Mick Jagger had it wrong: You can always get what you want. These days all our desires are gratified instantly. Seven-Eleven has become 24-seven. The Sabbath is for shopping and Christmas comes every day. There’s everything to do, but little of it matters in a society devoted to, divided by and dying of acquisition.

Refugee foster care in Mississippi —
When cultures and people clash

Donatella Lorch

It was a simple misunderstanding. The article in the small Catholic Diocesan newsletter in Jackson, MS., welcomed the newly arrived Sudanese refugees and declared that they were "good eaters" and enjoyed their food. No doubt it was meant to point out that after more than a decade of malnutrition and even bouts of starvation, the 55 Sudanese teenagers that had just arrived there in late 2000 were enjoying the wide variety of American foods available to them. But in fact Mildred Williams, the director of the foster program at Catholic Charities in Jackson, had deeply insulted her new wards. In the Dinka and Nuer cultures of South Sudan, one never commented on the healthiness of another person’s appetite. It was synonymous with accusing them of being greedy. And if you sat and ate together, you certainly never admitted you were hungry.

Coming Out Party: Haitian-American Women Step Out
From Behind The Scenes and
Into U.S. Politics

Marjorie Valbrun

Marie St. Fleur makes her way to the podium, zigzagging between the banquet tables, tossing a wave here, touching a few outstretched hands there, smiling like she’s buoyed by the warm applause and the giddy expectation coursing through the Miami hotel ballroom.

In the Name of the Father

Philippe Wamba

In For My Sons and Daughters, the South African poet Dennis Brutus conveyed a prophetic message to his children: "Memory of me will be a process of conscious and unconscious exorcism." As noted by chroniclers and scholars of the human experience from Euripides to Freud, coming of age necessitates coming to terms with your parents’ legacy. In Africa, where a new generation stands poised to inherit control of a continent from elders who are slowly relinquishing their grip on power seized in the 1960s, the future will largely be shaped by the ways in which young Africans selectively embrace or reject their parents’ example.

A Son Confronts Oil Poverty in the Niger Delta

Philippe Wamba

"As much money as they take out of here, this place should look like New York," Ken Wiwa says, gesturing at the passing landscape as his car, chauffeured by his father’s driver, Sonny, speeds southeast from Port Harcourt towards Ogoniland along the area’s only major road. The buildings of the city quickly give way to fields of banana and palm trees. Two gas flares, one at a local petrochemical plant, the other burning above the area’s lone oil refinery, are visible through the foliage, like palm trees with undulating orange flames in place of green fronds. Dozens of oil trucks are parked at the roadside, awaiting the opportunity to fill up with shipments of gasoline bound for all over Nigeria when the refinery opens on Monday morning. The scenery is lush and green, but except for the road, the nearby industrial plants and the occasional shack, it’s devoid of construction. Hardly a New York skyline.

Of Birds and Bombs

Mary Anne Weaver

I never thought I would ever want to return to Dalbandin, a little desert town of some five thousand people in the Pakistani province of Balochistan. It is one of the least memorable places I have ever been, situated uncomfortably in the middle of nowhere. It has mud-baked streets and a teeming bazaar, and clusters of tiny mud houses that are dwarfed by the soaring minarets of a white marble mosque, which had been built a number of years ago by the Saudi Arabian Defense Minister, Prince Sultan. The town's economy is based on grazing and smuggling, and every man seems to be armed. Dalbandinians are outnumbered by Afghan refugees two to one.

How Long Will It Last?

Mary Anne Weaver

The timing hardly seemed fortuitous. On May 1st, only 24 hours after a controversial referendum in Pakistan, which allowed General Pervez Musharraf to extend his Presidency for an additional five years — and, in the process, stripped away the country's last façade of constitutional rule — Pakistani officials acknowledged that U.S. ground forces would be permitted to operate inside Pakistan. Their objective: to pursue or ferret out members of al-Qaeda — and perhaps even Osama bin Laden himself — who were believed to be regrouping here, in the craggy mountains and rolling hills on both sides of the Pakistan-Afghan frontier. One Pakistani intelligence official told me that some three thousand or more al-Qaeda fighters and members of the Taliban had slipped across the Afghan border into Pakistan — most of them through the tribal areas of the North-West Frontier Province and Balochistan. Even bin Laden himself had been spotted twice in recent weeks, an Afghan intelligence official told the press, just across the border in Pakistan's tribal area of North Waziristan. But diplomatic and strategic constraints had kept the al-Qaeda vanguard beyond the reach of U.S. troops, something that had led to growing frustration, and irritation, in Washington. Musharraf would permit the Americans access, but on his terms.