The State of Black America: 50 Years after the 1965 Voting Rights Act

"Open Mic" to hear the voices of our emerging new leadership.....Voices of The Next Millennium.  Education, Social Justice, Mass Incarcerations, Health Care, Voting Rights and Labor are topics to be explored.  We invite the audience to participate in the conversation on Twitter, Facebook, texting, phone call and email. 

Special Guests:

1. Alex Johnson, Children's Defense Fund in CA.  A dynamic Morehouse man, a lawyer, and LA County School Board Member. 
2. Rashid Shabazz, Program Director with Open Society Foundation in NY.  The aim of the Foundation is to address the exclusion of large numbers of black men and boys from economic, social, educational and political life in the US.   Shabazz is working on the Campaign for Black Male Achievement.  He sees his work as part of the continuing legacy of the Civil Rights Movement.
3. Blandina Rose, Black Family Development.

There needs to be a constantly growing and always reviving activist movement across America if we are going to maintain and expand victories and our vision for America. Since MLK Day is upon us next week, we must not forget Martin Luther King stood before and with thousands of people who made the Civil Rights movement what it was.  From Jamestown's slave pens to Montgomery's boycotted busses, these ordinary men, women and the hundreds of children who led the movement, labored in obscurity, from Selma to Montgomery to Washington they provided the foot soldiers who walked in dignity, rather than ride in shame.  They faced bombs in Birmingham, mobs in Mississippi and sat down at lunch counters so others could stand up.  They marched and they organized.

Today we have a new emerging leadership leading marches, thousands are speaking out. What are the organizations and their leadership standing for?