A 16 year-old girl spent the last moments of Trayvon Martin’s life on the phone with him, as he complained about being followed by the man who would ultimately shoot him. [audio of suspects 911 call]

The Justice Department and the FBI, responding to a growing display of outrage, will open an investigation into the killing of Trayvon Martin, a 17 year-old African-American killed in a gated community in Sanford, Florida by a neighborhood watch captain. This follows a month of protests over the shooting and the failure of local authorities to arrest the shooter.

s it 2012? Yes, it is, but in Sanford, Florida (near Orlando), the clock winds back to the days of Deep South Justice. Unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was hunted down and gunned down for the heinous crime of “carrying Skittles while black.”

As we learned back in 2008, the race-baiting fringe was so overwhelmed by the possibility of having a black man as President that they became completely unglued, showing up at McCain/Palin rallies to hang their bigoted @sshattery out for the whole world to see, gleefully shaking monkey dolls with “Obama” on them, burning crosses and the like. And of course the GOP did nothing to condemn it — and even whipped up the racial/Muslim/terrorist angle.

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit the Gulf Coast in August and September of 2005, upending the lives of 1.5 million people and putting Black folks’ lack of political and social power front and center for all the world to see.

The storms magnified racial disparities in the U.S., and no place demonstrated this more clearly than New Orleans, where 80% of the city was submerged after Katrina.

This has got to be my all-time favorite excuse for racist behavior EVER. “I wasn’t insulting black people, I was insulting Asian people! Also people with ears, as regards the Linkin Park thing. What, that’s no cool anymore?”

The uncomfortable truth that some of our founding fathers owned human beings to work their fields, clean and cook in their homes, and serve as forced concubines has upset the Tennessee Tea Party. So the Tea Party wants the textbooks to have a new way of portraying the ”Minority Experience In History.”

Newt Gingrich has repeatedly made comment that denigrate poor people but are little more than racist and classist stereotypes and dog whistles. This open letter by Joi Ruth Orr, Director of Organizing, Faith Leaders for Community Change, calling for an apology from Mr. Gingrich, needs to be spread far and wide.

Too many people think King’s statements regarding justice are only about race and the African-American community – thus excluding the LGBTQ community. But King said that, “Eventually the civil rights movement will have contributed infinitely more to the nation than the eradication of racial justice.” Members of King’s family also embrace his words, extending them to the LGBTQ community.

When 700 Club host Kristi Watts interviewed Condi Rice about her holiday dishes, both agreed that mac and cheese was their favorite item on the menu. This baffled the out-to-lunch fundamentalist, apocalypse-predicting Robertson, who didn’t mince words – after all, Condi’s black, Watts is black, therefore mac and cheese=”black food”.