E. W. Jackson delivers his acceptance speech for the Republican nomination for Lt. Gov. at the Virginia Republican convention in Richmond, Va., May 18, 2013. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)

by Bob Lewis
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Virginia Republicans have chosen firebrand conservative minister E.W. Jackson's for lieutenant governor, the first Black candidate the party has nominated for statewide office since 1988.

President Barack Obama (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
 
by Christina Cassidy and Justin Pope

ATLANTA (AP) — When President Barack Obama addressed graduates at Morehouse College on Sunday, he also spoke to the broader community of historically Black colleges and universities — a proud corner of higher education that has struggled more than most during the last few years of economic distress.

Council member and attorney Chokwe Lumumba, is shown in this Sept. 14, 2010 photograph. The Democratic primary is likely to be decided in a runoff. (AP Photo/The Clarion-Ledger)

by Emily Wagster Pettus
JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — An attorney who was active in a Black nationalist group decades ago and still refers to a client as a "former Black Panther heroine" is running for mayor of Mississippi's capital city.

Raoul Cunningham, president of the Louisville, Kentucky, branch of the NAACP, speaks at DC Vote rally on Capitol Hill in support of S. 1257, the DC House Voting Rights Act, 17 Sep 2007. (Flikr Photo/Keith Ivey)
 
by Joseph Gerth
The Courier-Journal
 
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) — Raoul Cunningham was a gangly 17-year-old high school junior when Louisville police came for him at the lunch counter of the old Stewart's Department Store in February 1961. They handcuffed him, he says, and hauled him off to the old Children's Center juvenile facility on East Chestnut Street.

Over the next two years, that scenario would be repeated hundreds of times as Cunningham and other African-American high school students — mainly from Central and Male — waged a battle of sit-ins, squat-ins and stand-ins against restaurants, movie houses and other businesses that wouldn't serve them because of their race.