Debra Dickerson

Operation Rescue Those Unjustly Sentenced to Death

"Rescue those unjustly sentenced to death."Proverbs 24:11

"They shed innocent blood, the blood of their sons and their daughters...and the land was polluted with the blood."Psalm 106:38

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Debra Dickerson | Beliefnet | February 28, 2000

King Spin

How do you keep black people from finding out something you don't want them to know? Put it in a book.

Many such self-hating, defeatist jokes rattle around the black community like dry bones. Unfortunately, there's always a grain of truth in even the most painful "joke" (scratch the word "black" and you've described Americans in general), and this … more

Debra Dickerson | The Village Voice | January 12, 2000

False Prophet

Just when you thought your opinion of the Nation of Islam (NOI) and its reality-challenged leaders couldn't fall any lower, you find yourself clearing a space in the basement of… more

Debra Dickerson | Salon | January 6, 2000

Try Him Again

Probably the only thing the defense and the prosecution sides in the Mumia Abu-Jamal case would agree on is that the burden lies with the defense team to win him a retrial. Under the governing federal statute, the defense has to provide clear and convincing evidence that there was such endemic unfairness at the … more

Debra Dickerson | Salon | December 29, 1999

Black Like Who?

Depending on who's doing the talking, convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal is either a race-maddened psychopath cynically manipulating the gullible into helping him get away with murder, or an innocent artist and revolutionary railroaded onto death row by the racist forces of oppression.

Whatever the… more

Debra Dickerson | Salon | December 21, 1999

The Great American Orphan Abduction

In 1904, a group of New York nuns delivered 40 mostly Irish but entirely Catholic orphans to a remote Arizona mining town to be adopted by local Catholics. What happened next is the subject of historian Linda Gordon's compelling new book: For their act of Christian charity, the nuns were rewarded with near-lynching and public vilification of an intensity… more

Debra Dickerson | Salon | December 13, 1999

The Elements of Style

Born a working-class Negro girl from podunk, Pennsylvania, in a world designed to minimize her, B. Smith set out to build herself a new one. The empire she's built may be about food and frivolity, but its cultural significance hints at the coming face of race in America.

Notwithstanding her… more

Debra Dickerson | The Village Voice | November 9, 1999

Goodnight Irene

One day the Democratic Party may wake up and wonder where all the black people have gone. While blacks over 50, especially older black women, remain solidly Democratic, the young are increasingly alienated from politics in general -- and from the Democratic Party in particular.

Now that high-profile black Republicans like… more

Debra Dickerson | Salon | October 22, 1999

White Men Can Jump

It was the headline -- "White man gets mayoral nomination in Baltimore" -- that got the Washington Post into so much hot water last month that its ombudsman, R. Shipp, felt obliged to issue this odd mea culpa

[The headline] reveals a heightened sensitivity… more

Debra Dickerson | Salon | October 12, 1999

The Real Bush Drug Scandal

One minute, you're tooling along the bustling superhighways of downtown Houston with its sleek office towers and important-looking people driving fancy cars. Then you exit at Scott Street, enter the Third Ward Bottoms, and head back in time -- back to those old sepia photos of the Mississippi Delta, circa 1940.

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Debra Dickerson | Salon | September 13, 1999