Today the NAACP wraps up its convention celebrating its 100-year anniversary. For a look at what the group's future fights for civil rights should be and how their past accomplishments shaped the nation, we are joined by Lani Gunier. Lani Guinier is the Bennett Boskey Professor of Law at Harvard ...

NAACP Benjamin Jealous, photo: Jeffrey Macmillan

This week the NAACP kicked off a six-day convention celebrating its 100 year anniversary. Even with Barack Obama as our first African American president, the NAACP sees its work as ...

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Throughout the last century, the struggle of the civil rights movement has been documented in photos, speeches, poems and paintings. Paul Miller, a.k.a. DJ Spooky, mixed clips from the long history of the civil rights movement and created ...

The NAACP has gathered in New York for a six-day convention celebrating its 100-year anniversary. It’s an enormous affair with giants such as Cornel West, Reverend Jesse Jackson, and President Obama paying tribute to the accomplishments of the civil rights organization.
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From The Takeaway

In The New York Times from June 1, 1909, the headline on page 2 read :'Whites and Blacks Confer as Equals,' referencing 'a conference to consider the uplifting of the negro.'

It wasn't even called ...

I got married last year and was actually somewhat excited this month when I arrived at the accountant's office. For some reason, my husband and I were under the shared delusion that we'd be getting a big fat tax refund.

Not so: These wee slips of gold around our ring fingers cost us a fair chunk of money. But the four-hour slog at the accountant's also started me thinking about the social contract hidden within the 17,000 pages of tax code.

Our painful April 15 ritual is arguably the only thing we do together as a country. Undocumented immigrants, conservative Republicans, anarchists, grannies, teenage babysitters, janitors and bankers line up every year, fill out a series of tedious forms, and stand ready to have what they've monetarily accomplished for the year added up and held to account. Of course, people from those same groups also cheat together as a country (joining Tom Daschle and dozens of other nominees to government posts). But cheating is part of the ritual. (As is tax evasion: Leona Helmsley reportedly said, “Only the little people pay taxes.” Then she was audited by the IRS and sentenced to four years in prison.)

Whether you like its priorities or not, the tax code represents our country’s social and political agreement: who should pay and who should pay more; who gets penalized for working or not working; what institutions in our society are valued; and what it means to be a full member of society, or a buyer of the social contract.

Guilt, obligation, bureaucracy, hard labor and relief when it’s finally over — all the same elements as a bad family reunion. As your resident geek at the family dinner table, I’m going to write about some of the most interesting pieces of tax day over the next few weeks. Send any questions along and I'll try to answer them.

— Sitara Nieves