Free Republic

Like many Angelenos, I spend a lot of time behind the wheel of my car. I drive from my Westside apartment to Dodger Stadium near downtown and farther east to hike in the San Gabriel Mountains. I take the 405 Freeway north to the San Fernando Valley to see friends, or occasionally south to the L.A. Times office — or to the airport, where I grow my carbon footprint even further. So I couldn’t help but consider my own complicity while reading a new study from USC researchers, finding that Angelenos who drive more tend to be exposed to less...

Actress Jurnee Smollett, brother of hate crime hoaxer Jussie Smollett, says HBO’s latest racially charged drama, Lovecraft Country, is a fictional reflection of a segregation and Jim Crow-era America that black people “are still on that quest today in 2020” to overcome. “[Racism] is sometimes even more of a threat because it’s unexpected,” Jurnee Smollett said on a Television Critics Association panel discussing the HBO series, which is set in 1950s. The J.J. Abrams and Jordan Peele-produced drama sees black characters face racism while battling the fictional creatures and monsters of Marc Ruff’s famous fiction novel. “It affects your livelihood...

So far, the conversation about the upcoming Boston Red Sox visit to Donald Trump’s White House has centered around the people of color who are skipping the event. The manager Alex Cora, a critic of the Trump administration’s inexcusable treatment of Puerto Rico amid the devastation of Hurricane Maria in 2017, cited his home island’s continuing troubles as his reason for opting out.

<p>"Some Republicans gave up on winning the African American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization. I am here today as the Republican Chairman to tell you we were wrong.".</p> <p>In the election of 1968, Richard Nixon saw the cracks in the solid south as an opportunity to tap into a group of voters that had heretofore been beyond the reach of the Republican Party. The United States was undergoing a very turbulent period in 1968. The founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and most influential member of the Civil Rights Movement, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated April 4, 1968. His death was followed by race riots. Martin Luther King’s policy of non-violence was being challenged by more radical blacks and by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. There were protests, often violent, against the Vietnam War. The drug subculture was causing alarm in many sectors. Nixon, with the aid of Harry Dent and then South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, who had switched to the Republican Party in 1964, ran on a campaign of states' rights and "law and order". Many liberals accused him of pandering to racist Southern whites, especially with regards to his "states' rights" stand.</p>