From the Detroit News:

Former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, released from state prison this morning after serving 14 months, vowed to come back to Detroit to tell his story.

"Detroit, I will return to speak frankly with you about this experience because it has affected all of us," Kilpatrick said in a released statement. "I am beginning anew. I am looking forward. I have new dreams and aspirations. I have a new hope. My greatest desire is that my testimony will give anyone who will listen permission to dream of greatness and to push toward it even in the midst of failure.

Read more here.

From AlterNet:

The NAACP has just passed a historic resolution demanding an end to the War on Drugs. The resolution comes as young Black male unemployment hovers near 50 percent and the wealth gap's become a veritable gulf. So why is the forty-year-old "War on Drugs" public enemy number one for the nation's oldest civil rights organization?

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From The State:

Nobody can remember seeing Matthew Perry angry. Determined? Always. Fearless? No question. Forceful and firm? Without a doubt. Kind, compassionate and respectful? Without fail. But never angry. Never bitter. Perry's remarkable temperament - and unmatched legal skills - were essential to the relatively peaceful progress of civil rights in South Carolina during the turbulent 1960s and beyond. While the state endured pain and tragedy in those days, South Carolina advanced with "far less turmoil than her neighbors," Chief U.S. District Judge Joseph F. Anderson Jr. wrote in a 2004 tribute to Perry.

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From the Atlantic:

The mob, members of an outlawed gang, blindfolded Walter Odondi with a strip of cloth and steered him through the narrow alleys of Nairobi's Kibera slum, slapping him with the flat sides of their machetes as they went. They frog-marched the frightened 16-year-old for half an hour before stopping at a clearing just outside the slum, not far from the Nairobi Dam. Standing there, Odondi could hear the sound of machetes being sharpened on stones. As he made one last attempt to flee, two men grabbed his limbs and threw him to the grass.

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From the Washington Post:

A group of young black professionals in Anacostia has gathered over spinach-strawberry salad and white wine, when the conversation turns, as if often does, to what they call the "G-word": gentrification. "I used to think it was about race - when white people moved into a black neighborhood," said lawyer Charles Wilson, 35, who lost to Marion Barry in the 2008 Ward 8 D.C. Council race. "Then, I looked up the word. It's when a middle-class person moves into a poor neighborhood. And I realized: I am a gentrifier. I couldn't believe it. I don't like that word. It makes so many people uncomfortable."

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From CBS News:

A daughter of Malcolm X has been sentenced to five years of probation for stealing the identity of an elderly family friend to run up big credit card bills. Prosecutors say Malikah Shabazz (shuh-BAHZ') made $55,000 in illegal purchases.

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From the Creosote Journal:

There are few external markers to show you what David Hilliard knows about certain places in Oakland. He knows where to find the bullet holes that still pockmark a house, puncture a fence railing. As Hilliard tells it, he was hiding in a house nearby, one night in 1968, shortly after the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. He listened as some 1,900 rounds were emptied by the police force.

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From the Boston Globe:

One of the worst droughts in a century, compounded by high food prices and unremitting political strife, is spawning an immense humanitarian crisis on the Horn of Africa. Thousands of Somalis are fleeing their homeland each week; most of those who survive the brutal journey end up in refugee camps in neighboring Kenya.


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From the Gothamist:

Flatiron bar and lounge 230 Fifth (you may recall its rooftop bar as the host of Kobayashi's controversial solo hotdog eating contest on July 4) is at the center of a $500 million racial discrimination lawsuit filed by a black man from Texas.

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From WAMU.org:

The Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial won't be unveiled for another month, but one group had the chance to get a sneak peek at it yesterday.

Read more here.