Onyx Impact has released its eye-opening BlackOut Report which reveals that the efforts to derail Black progress are not merely historical footnotes but present-day threats. In just the past eight months, there have been 15,723 distinct impact points, each representing a direct attack on Black opportunities, lives, or histories.
This Saturday marks one month of the federal government shutdown. Hundreds of thousands of federal workers—nearly 20% of whom are Black and 30% of whom are veterans—are missing their second paycheck. Families across the country will be forced to choose between paying for groceries, rent and medical care. President Trump and his allies in Congress are inflicting this pain because they would rather shut down the government than deal with the looming health care crisis that will explode costs for more than 170 million Americans.
Twenty-five attorneys general across the country and three governors have filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Agriculture and its Secretary, Brooke Rollins, after the agency moved to suspend the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as SNAP, which helps more than 40 million Americans buy food each month.
“Fear is the tool that people use when they don’t really stand for anything. That is what they use,” said LaTosha Brown, the founder of Black Voters Matter, to a crowd of supporters outside a courthouse in Virginia in support of New York Attorney General Letitia James. After being indicted on “mortgage fraud” on Oct. 9, by a Trump Administration Department of Justice that has seen an endless carousel of sudden firings, replacements, and drama, James is defiant. Many legal observers predict that the charges against her will be dismissed.
“Democrats are going to take back control of the United States House of Representatives. It’s the reason why we see Republicans in full-blown panic right now,” House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries to reporters on Capitol Hill on Oct. 22. Democrats have been strategizing on redistricting strategy with leaders in Democratic states since Republicans in Texas. “We’ve never seen this level of extraordinary gerrymandering attempts take place across the country.
It was just after dawn in Paris when the sirens began to wail through the narrow streets surrounding the Louvre. Soldiers with rifles guarded the courtyard, tourists were turned away, and the great glass pyramid stood silent under a gray sky. Inside, the world’s most visited museum had been stripped of eight priceless jewels once belonging to Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie.
Donald Trump’s claim that “beautiful Black women” were begging him to come to Chicago was not flattery. It was a lie that weaponized race and gender to mask a long record of cruelty and contempt. It was a performance designed to seduce the uninformed and comfort those willing to excuse his open assault on the people he pretends to praise.
There is a lie moving through America. It creeps through congressional halls and across television screens, whispering that undocumented immigrants live freely off the sweat of the American taxpayer. It is a lie told by those who know better and repeated by those who are too ignorant—or too hateful—to care. And while the lie spreads, the truth is being brutalized on the streets.
A new report from the Brookings Institution warns that the nation’s job market may be entering a period of instability that could worsen racial and economic disparities. While the overall unemployment rate held steady between June 2024 and June 2025, joblessness among Black workers rose by more than half a percent.
The White House has continued to wage war against the American people — not through bombs or foreign troops, but through policies that strip workers of their dignity, their pay, and their hope. The cruelty is no accident. It is deliberate, orchestrated, and flaunted as a spectacle of power. America’s government has turned its might inward, and its victims are the citizens who once believed they were free.
Carolyn Jean Cheeks Kilpatrick, an assertive advocate for Detroit and Black owned businesses, died on October 7 in Atlanta. She was 80. The former Congressman first won election to the U.S. Congress in 1996 and served until 2011 after losing a primary election in 2010 to former Congressman Hansen Clarke.
The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC) announced ten key state legislative races to watch this November, touting the contests as pivotal for maintaining and expanding Democratic power in states such as Virginia, New Jersey, Minnesota, Mississippi, and Washington. Yet, even as the DLCC calls attention to its candidates and their communities, the party’s silence and neglect toward Black-owned media — particularly the historic Black Press of America — continues to speak louder than its press releases.
The Posse Comitatus Act was born in 1878. It was short, a single sentence, but it carried a promise: soldiers would not patrol American streets. Its origin was poisoned by the retreat from Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow, but its meaning grew larger. It became a vow that liberty cannot live where rifles enforce the law of civilians.
Democrats and Republicans are both pointing fingers, saying the shutdown is the other party’s fault. The government shutdown means that money has stopped flowing, and there is no continuing resolution to continue the funding for the government. Republicans are in charge of the House, Senate, and White House and do not want to open borders or focus on healthcare to expand the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.
Lieutenant Colonel George E. Hardy, one of the last surviving Tuskegee Airmen to fly combat missions during World War II, has died in Sarasota, Florida. He was 100 years old.
During the 2024 presidential campaign, now-Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought said he wanted to put federal workers “in trauma.” Project 2025 called union representation of government workers “incompatible with democracy” and recommended Congress make having a voice on a federal job illegal.
The air in Washington has grown thick with a familiar tension, the kind that precedes the shuttering of government offices and the silencing of paychecks for thousands of workers. Yet at the heart of this looming shutdown lies something far greater than partisan brinkmanship: a ferocious fight for the soul of America’s healthcare.
“This is the worst I’ve felt about this country in years,” said Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, standing on the House steps and talking about the state of play in the U.S. “I can’t imagine anyone voting against this resolution,” said House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) as members of the House, led by Republicans Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar, considered a resolution to honor Charlie Kirk. Kirk was murdered on September 10 during an outdoor appearance at Utah Valley University.
For more than five years, Dr. Olumuyiwa Bamgbade carried the weight of lies that he should never have borne. He is a Black doctor, a healer by training, acquitted of false accusations that Canadian authorities and media were eager to trumpet but too arrogant, too complicit, to retract. The silence after his vindication was louder than the slander that preceded it. The cruelty is not simply in the malicious lies about him, but in the determination of a system to criminalize his very existence.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is in upheaval, and the consequences are falling hardest on Black Americans.
