Areva Martin

By Freddie Allen

WASHINGTON (NNPA) – Areva Martin watched her youngest child play with growing concern. Marty was almost 18 months old and he didn’t play like other kids his age. Instead of racing toy cars on a track or across the floor, Marty would organize them in lines. He did the same thing with crayons. Instead of scribbling on paper or trying to color, he would just line them up. Marty played obsessively with random objects that he would find around the house: a house shoe, a cup, or a spoon would consume hours of playtime. But Martin, a lawyer living in Los Angeles, was most concerned about his speech.

“The first thing that came to my mind was, ‘This kid isn’t speaking, so let’s get him to a speech therapist,’” she said. After several months with a speech therapist, and no signs of improvement, Martin took her son to a developmental pediatrician. That’s when she learned that Marty was autistic.

“I knew very little about autism. I wasn’t even thinking about autism,” said Martin. “It wasn’t even a word in my vocabulary.”

The EEOC, run by Jacqueline Berrien, weighed in on background checks. (AP Photo/File)

by Freddie Allen

WASHINGTON (NNPA) – The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the agency that enforces federal employment discrimination laws, filed lawsuits against BMW and the discount retailer Dollar General alleging that the companies broad use of criminal background checks discriminate against Black applicants and employees.

According to the EEOC, BMW fired dozens of Black employees at one of its plants in South Carolina during “a transitional period” that required employees to re-apply for their jobs. A BMW contractor performed criminal background checks that exposed criminal convictions that prevented the employees from getting rehired. The Washington Post reported that 70 Black employees lost their jobs through the process.

“One woman with 14 years under her belt was let go after a misdemeanor conviction surfaced that was more than 20 years old and carried a $137 fine, according to the EEOC’s lawsuit,” the Washington Post reported.

JOHNNY C. TAYLOR, PRESIDENT AND CEO OF THE THURGOOD MARSHALL COLLEGE FUND

by Freddie Allen

WASHINGTON (NNPA) – Saint Paul’s College, a historically Black college founded in 1888 in partnership with the Episcopal Church, announced last week that it’s shutting down and working to help current students transfer to other institutions.

The school, located in Lawrenceville, Va., announced that it was closing after a deal that would have allowed Saint Augustine’s College in Raleigh, N.C. to acquire the struggling college collapsed under the weight of Saint Paul’s debt.

Already mired in debt, Saint Paul’s College terminated its sports programs in 2011 to cut costs. When the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, a regional group that certifies degree-granting institutions, rescinded the schools accreditation last summer, administrators went to court to get it back.

Now, both the accreditation and the school are gone.

by Nadia Bilchik

(CNN) -- I was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1964, the year Martin Luther King Jr. was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the Civil Rights Act was passed in the United States, and Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life in prison.

Mine was a relatively idyllic childhood in the affluent and segregated northern suburbs of Johannesburg. Like many White South Africans, I lived in an ignorant cocoon of privilege, with no idea that having two live-in maids, a full-time gardener and a driver was unusual. It was perfectly normal for my African nannies, Rosina and Phina, to live with us rather than with their own children, and there was no need to learn their language or even their last names.

It was only as a teenager that I began to realize something was horribly wrong. Phina and I were walking along the road of our pristine "Whites only" neighborhood when we saw a police van stop. Two armed White police officers got out and began interrogating the Black passers by. They roughly shoved several of them into their van, screaming obscenities all the time.