By Reginald Stuart WASHINGTON, DC — Sentencing reform advocates and educators across the state and nation have lambasted a declaration by U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions ordering the nation’s U.S. District Attorneys to seek the harshest of federal penalties for alleged federal offenders including mandatory minimum sentences for low-level illegal drug offenders. The sweeping declaration was issued earlier this month and comes on the heels of several years of progressive criminal justice reforms achieved on a bi-partisan level in a variety of states, including Tennessee and Alabama. In the recent announcement regarding the “charging and sentencing policy” for the Department…
Author: Reginald Stuart
By Reginald Stuart As a kid growing up in a low-income neighborhood in South Nashville, Ben Jobe had no idea what his future held. Nor did his parents or the students he went to school with or the teachers who inherited the soft spoken youngster. Before most people could realize it, Jobe showed teachers he was an intellectually smart kid who also had impressive talents when he had command of a basketball. In his adolescent years he emerged as one of the top high school students and basketball players of his generation. In the 1950’s, Jobe helped Pearl High School…
By Reginald Stuart WASHINGTON—President Trump this week made historic and symbolic embraces of the nation’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU’s), welcoming university chiefs to the White House and issuing an Executive Order continuing and moving the White House Initiatives on HBCUs to the White House to facilitate more direct contact with White House senior staff. The brief White House gathering was the first time a group of HBCU presidents has been officially greeted by a President in the nation’s history. Dr. Glenda Glover, President of Tennessee State University, was among a group of more than 50 HBCUs represented during…
By Reginald Stuart WASHINGTON, DC — The future of most of the nation’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), most of them heavily dependent upon federal student aid funds to operate, is expected to get serious discussion here next week as dozens of presidents of HBCU’s from across the nation are set to gather with Republican lawmakers on Capitol and officials of the Trump Administration. Betsy DeVos, President Trump’s controversial new Secretary of Education, is set to address the Capitol Hill gathering Monday as keynote luncheon speaker. Devos, a Michigan billionaire who is part of the Amway products family, has…
By Reginald Stuart NASHVILLE, TN — Fisk University’s hunt for a permanent president and more philanthropic support got harder this month with the announcement by Atlanta’s Morehouse College, a Fisk peer, that it was not renewing the contract of Dr. John Wilson, its president for nearly four years, when his current contract expires June 30. The announcement by Wilson and the Morehouse Board of Trustees was made January 16, the day the nation’s celebrates the birth of the late civil right icon the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the most famous graduate of Morehouse. Aside from comments of praise…
By Reginald Stuart United States President Barack Obama spent some of his final hours in office making good on his promise to help imprisoned non-violent federal offenders a “Second Chance” by commuting the prison sentences of more than 500 federal prisoners. More than a dozen Tennesseans from across the state were among those covered by one of two commutation packages released last week, as Obama and his White House team were packing their bags after eight years of national leadership. The commutations issued as Obama exited do no equate to his waving a magic wand freeing those directly affected. As…
NASHVILLE, TN — For decades, the news media has played an important role in our city, state, nation and world. At its best, the media helps us keep track of the comings and goings of our society, form births to deaths and all points in between. In the process, the media manages to keep some of us informed about some of the things some of the time while annoying and agonizing, en- lightening and entertaining us. As our nation has grown and changed, that constant turn of our history’s pages has shown us time and time again no one media…