The surprise announcement that Bruce Gordon, whose father co-founded the Camden [N.J.] NAACP, will resign later this month as the civil rights group’s national president has created a watershed moment for that organization. Gordon’s quick exit in less than two years means the NAACP’s unwieldy 64-member board never found comfort in his business approach to tackling the inequities that still limit African-Americans. But in rebuffing Gordon’s methods, the 98-year-old NAACP may have limited its future.
Philadelphia Inquirer
High-profile trials have regularly mushroomed throughout American history into public dramas that reveal deeper, underlying tensions within society: Aaron Burr, John Brown, the Rosenbergs, O.J. Simpson–these cases transcended issues of guilt or innocence. As my Columbia Law colleague Robert Ferguson has shown in a recently published book on trials in American life, these cases became polarizing forces that compelled citizens to choose which side they were on.
Whether the [I. Lewis “Scooter”] Libby perjury trial will have the impact of the Alger Hiss perjury case over a half-century ago, which launched Richard Nixon’s career, remains to be seen. But that is precisely the point–its meaning has yet to be determined, and it will be a political process in which the public decides.
John Coffee, New York Sun
The furor over the documentary “The Lost Tomb of Jesus” … was caused by an unholy alliance of two Christian-right bugbears: science and Hollywood. (If only Hillary Clinton could have been involved too–Pat Robertson’s head might well have exploded.) … The man who showed us Kate Winslet’s breasts in “Titanic” was boasting that he had brought God to Manhattan in a box and DNA-tested him like a dinosaur femur.
James Poniewozik, Time
