Slavery by Another Name

Slavery by Another Name is a 90-minute PBS documentary about how thousands of African Americans were pulled back into forced labor with shocking force and brutality in the post Civil War years through the mid-1940s.

Based on the 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Douglas Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name spans eight decades, from 1865 to 1945, revealing the interlocking forces in both the South and the North that enabled this “neoslavery” to begin and persist. It was a system in which men, often guilty of no crime at all, were arrested, compelled to work without pay, repeatedly bought and sold, and coerced to do the bidding of masters.

The documentary premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival and had its national broadcast on PBS on Feb. 13, 2012.

Online Voter Registration For Texans?

Texas could become the 27th state to allow online voter registration, if two bills on the House Elections Committee's schedule for this week, HB 76 and HB 953, receive favorable consideration.

These bills propose allowing voters who have an unexpired Texas driver's license or personal identification card to register online and have that application automatically authenticated rather than having to hand print a paper registration application form and wait on local election officials to data-enter the information into their systems and verify it.

Those Texans who do not have a Texas driver's license or personal identification card would still have to mail in the old paper registration form.

Call, email, or write your State House Representative and Senator and say you want them to vote for online voter registration!

Citizen Journalism

The process of gathering and reporting news has changed significantly due to the advent of the Web, which has enabled the increasing involvement of citizens in news production. This trend has been given many names, including Citizen Journalism, participatory journalism, and crowd-sourced journalism.

Citizen Journalism describes the different kinds of journalism people can do on their own, without media companies or professional salaried journalists necessarily involved.

This can be as simple as regularly commenting on news story in the Dallas Morning News that adds information or perspective the reporter left out, writing letters to the editor or as demanding as self-publishing a news and editorial blog on the Internet.

Citizen journalists are members of the public who play an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing, fact checking and disseminating news and information. The intent of this participation is to provide independent, reliable, accurate, wide-ranging and relevant information that a democracy requires.