Top (left to right): Geoffrey Gardner, Drew Tewksbury, Joanne Griffith, Allison Samuels, and Zachary Slobig

Middle (left to right): Sonata Lee-Narcisse, Sasa Woodruff, Sherene Strausberg, [former staffer] Kenya Young, Tony Cox, Roy Hurst and Geoffrey Bennett

Seated (left to right): Christabel Nsiah-Buadi, Nicole Childers and Devin Robins

Not pictured: Marcia Caldwell

Folks,

We aired our last original broadcast of News & Notes today — Friday, March 20. And by 6 p.m. Pacific time, all the staffers here will have cleaned out their desks, turned in their I.D. badges, and discontinued their voice mail and e-mails. In that regard, we're going through what the rest of America is dealing with during these very tough economic times.

But, while it's the end of a show, it's not the end of what we started six-and-a-half years ago, first with Tavis Smiley, then with Ed Gordon, then with Farai Chideya, and lastly, with me as host. The central idea of News & Notes is that black folks matter. Our opinions matter. Our views matter. And we want to be heard. We want to be part of the national and international political and cultural dialogue, and not in the way mainstream media decides for us, but in the way that we decide for ourselves.

NPR was courageous enough to give that idea birth.

Now, it's up to us to keep it going.

So goodbye, News & Notes.

Hello, future.

The Soul of John Black is a band with a sound every bit as varied as the musical experiences of its leader, John Bigham.

Many people know Bigham from the ska-funk band Fishbone, but he also backed up jazz legend Miles Davis. Tony Cox talks with the musician, who also gives an in-studio performance.

Listen to the full interview here.

Calling Detroit "a northern New Orleans without the French Quarter," the Chicago Tribune reports the median price of a home sold in the city was a mere $7,500 in December 2008.

Among the many dispiriting numbers that bleakly depict the decrepitude of this onetime industrial behemoth, the steep slide of housing values helps define the daunting challenge to anyone who wants to lead this shrinking, poverty-pocked city of about 800,000 people.

"We're always fighting ourselves out of a hole," said Wayne County Sheriff Warren Evans.

Despite the depth of the hole, Evans is running for mayor. In fact, he is one of 15 people who have raised their hands to be mayor of Detroit and fill the remaining months in office of the former mayor who now wears a green jumpsuit and resides in Evans' spartan house of justice, the Wayne County Jail.

Detroit has long been the snide remark and punch line to derogatory urban humor, and the conviction last fall of two-term Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick for lying about an extramarital affair with his chief of staff reinforced suspicions that Detroit is beyond help, let alone self-governance. But as the domestic auto industry, the city's principal private-sector employer and founding corporate father, seeks a financial bailout from Washington, formerly whispered remarks about the prospect of the nation's 11th-largest city being the first major American city to go bankrupt are now publicly discussed.

If the Obama administration is looking for a city to test new ideas for chronic urban problems, it can look to Detroit, a northern New Orleans without the French Quarter.

Rush Limbaugh's now infamous "I hope Obama fails" dictate has touched off a firestorm within the GOP in recent weeks. Critics have lambasted the popular radio host for using such language, including a few Republicans. However, each Republican critique has been quickly followed up by an apology to Limbaugh— beginning with Rep. Phil Gingrey and moving all the way up to the on-going tussle with RNC chairman Michael Steele. With his 20 million listeners sympathetic to the conservative cause, it's probably not good politics for any of them to ruffle Rush's feathers. This all begs the question: Who, exactly, is the leader of the Republican Party?

Newly minted RNC chairman Michael Steele is the latest Republican to get blasted on Rush Limbaugh's radio show, this time for calling the man "an entertainer" whose show is "incendiary" and "ugly."

Here's the video of that exchange between Steele and D.L. Hughley:

Well, Limbaugh did not take kindly to that critique, and responded on his radio show. Then, low and behold, Michael Steele came up with an apology. According to Politico:

"My intent was not to go after Rush — I have enormous respect for Rush Limbaugh," Steele said in a telephone interview. "I was maybe a little bit inarticulate. ... There was no attempt on my part to diminish his voice or his leadership."

"I went back at that tape and I realized words that I said weren't what I was thinking," Steele said. "It was one of those things where I thinking I was saying one thing, and it came out differently. What I was trying to say was a lot of people ... want to make Rush the scapegoat, the bogeyman, and he's not."

Then the third "voice of the GOP," Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, threw his hat into the ring. On Larry King Live, Jindal said he was glad Steele had apologized.

With all this in-fighting and back-pedaling, will the Republican Party rise to the challenge of re-making their party— by taking on Democrats— or merely succumb to the pressure?

David Letterman didn't mince words the other night when he welcomed Katie Couric on to his show. Calling Limbaugh a "bonehead," he also made fun of Rush's CPAC appearance, saying he looked like an "East European gangster."

Share your thoughts below.

President Obama will address a joint session of Congress tonight, focusing mainly on his plans to fix the flagging economy. Here's more of what you can expect, via the Detroit Free Press:

— First, as he did with the middle-class tax cut in the stimulus bill, he'll talk up intentions for another campaign promise: health care reform, with guarantees of better access for more people.

— Second, Obama will work on bolstering the public's trust by recognizing the cost of the stimulus and promising to cut the federal deficit in half by 2013, the end of his term, by trimming some spending (especially by scaling back in Iraq) and raising taxes on the wealthy, as advertised by his campaign.

— Third, he'll talk about resolve, about commitment to change and about how all these efforts will take time. Don't be surprised if he cautioned against attaching too much importance to a day's or week's swing in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

What do you want to hear from President Obama tonight?

Viewed in an academic context, the controversial New York Post editorial cartoon, which some believe mocks President Obama, belongs to a category of racist — and dangerous — "cognitive associations."

That is the conclusion of Phillip Atiba Goff, an assistant professor at the department of psychology at the University of California.

Read part of his essay written in response to the furor, excerpted here:

For the better part of the past seven years, my colleagues and I have conducted research on the psychological phenomenon of dehumanization. Specifically, we have examined cognitive associations between African Americans and non-human apes. And the association leads to bad things. When we began the research, we were skeptical of whether or not participants even knew that people of African descent were caricatured as ape-like — as less than human — throughout the better part of the past 400 years. And, in fact, many were not. However, even those who were unaware of this historical association demonstrated a cognitive association between blacks and apes. That is, when they thought of apes, they thought of blacks and vice versa — when they thought of blacks, they thought of apes.

But the fact of this cognitive association was not the most disturbing part of the research. Rather, it was the fact that the association between blacks and apes could lead to violence.

Click here to read more of Goff's findings. Hat tip to Baratunde Thurston of Jack & Jill Politics.

We had one of those conversations on News & Notes today that I think hits home for everybody.

What should you be called if you're an adult and a child addresses you? What about strangers? Or, what if you've achieved a status that has earned a title of one sort or another?

This all started with Barack Obama, of course, whose I'm-just-one-of-the-guys demeanor belies his elected status as the leader of the free world. What further complicates it, is the nasty history of racial subjugation that is so stingingly present when people of color, any color actually, are reduced by the insult of being called "out of their name." The "N" word comes to mind here.

My NPR colleague Karen Grigsby Bates literally wrote the book on the subject of name-calling etiquette, and, coming from a black perspective, she knows full well the reasons why we sometimes call people what we call them.

Having Kevin Ross, a former Los Angeles Superior Court judge, join the conversation made it even more compelling, since his original on-air reference to the president as "Barack" got a lot of listeners upset last week. He didn't back down, but he explained himself.

We all have stories of people mispronouncing our names, not using our titles (if we have one), or being too familiar with us before they know us. Throw in the racial dynamic, and there is the potential for all sorts of unpleasant encounters. Check out the conversation we had, and give us your feedback.

What's in a name depends on who's talking and who they're talking to. I'm reminded of what my dad used to say, tongue partly in cheek. He said, "Call me what you want, just don't call me late for dinner."

Al Sharpton says a political cartoon in today's New York Post (above) "is troubling at best," when viewed in a racial context. The cartoon appears to spoof yesterday's police shooting of a raging chimpanzee in Connecticut and President Obama signing his billion-dollar stimulus bill into law.

Sharpton issued this written statement:

"The cartoon in today's New York Post is troubling at best given the historic racist attacks of African-Americans as being synonymous with monkeys. One has to question whether the cartoonist is making a less than casual reference to this when in the cartoon they have police saying after shooting a chimpanzee that "Now they will have to find someone else to write the stimulus bill."

"Being that the stimulus bill has been the first legislative victory of President Barack Obama (the first African American president) and has become synonymous with him it is not a reach to wonder are they inferring that a monkey wrote the last bill?"

The Post followed with this:

"The cartoon is a clear parody of a current news event, to wit the shooting of a violent chimpanzee in Connecticut. It broadly mocks Washington's efforts to revive the economy. Again, Al Sharpton reveals himself as nothing more than a publicity opportunist."

What do you think?

In the latest round of news coming out of Illinois, it appears Senator Roland Burris' ethical credentials are still up in the air.

According to the Chicago Tribune:

U.S. Sen. Roland Burris has acknowledged he sought to raise campaign funds for then-Gov. Rod Blagojevich at the request of the governor's brother at the same time he was making a pitch to be appointed to the Senate seat previously held by President Barack Obama.

Burris' latest comments in Peoria Monday night were the first time he has publicly said he was actively trying to raise money for Blagojevich. Previously Burris has left the impression that he always balked at the issue of raising money for the governor because of his interest in the Senate appointment.

Read the entire back-and-forth here.

What is your take on the Burris matter? Please leave your comments below.

Though he hasn't yet been in office for a full month, President Barack Obama's presence in the White House has sparked a wholesale reevaluation of long-held beliefs and assumptions about race in America.

It extends beyond, for instance, rehashed debates about the continuing relevance of Black History Month to something deeper, which frequent News & Notes guest and Spelman College associate professor William Jelani Cobb considers in a post titled, "Confessions of a Reluctant Flag-Waver."

He writes: "These are strange days. Last August, I was caught on camera waving an American flag at the Democratic National Convention. This from the man who, as a student activist at Howard University, was caught on camera lowering the flag and raising a red, black and green one in its place." The following is an excerpt:

(L)ike all else concerning black people in this country, the interconnectedness of black history and American history has become more complex with age. Since Nov. 4, 2008, it has seemed little more than an indecipherable riddle of identity. There are those who saw the election returns and divined from them a declarative statement, a reply to Frederick Douglass' enduring question, "What to the slave is the 4th of July?" Or maybe a libation poured for those souls who died clearing the route to this moment.

These are strange days. Last August, I was caught on camera waving an American flag at the Democratic National Convention. This from the man who, as a student activist at Howard University, was caught on camera lowering the flag and raising a red, black and green one in its place. The same man who scowled when a military chaplain handed my mother an American flag at my father's funeral. During the uproar over the Confederate flags flying in Georgia, I frequently pointed out that black people suffered for far longer under the stars and stripes than we ever did under the stars and bars. And there are still no simple answers.

There are still voices that see Obama's election as the ultimate gesture of cynicism, the moment at which a black face was put to the service of this nation's global schemes and third-world adventurism. As the 44th president, Obama has necessarily fallen in with a checkered crowd: Washington, who laid out precise numbers of slaves to keep a perfect gender ratio of the Negroes he owned; Jefferson, who crossed out the lines in the Declaration of Independence that condemned the slave trade, copy editing black freedom out of existence. Jackson, who strangled abolitionist efforts and bought a black girl at an auction for his own entertainment; Lyndon B. Johnson, who signed civil rights laws but never relinquished his profane noun of choice for black people. Even Barack's boy, Abraham Lincoln, was arm-twisted into glory and penned the Emancipation Proclamation as he struggled to exile freed blacks outside America's borders. It's this kind of thing that will make your head grow weary of pondering.

On the day after the election, one of my students announced to me that the question was no longer "What to the slave is the 4th of July" but "What to the African American is the 4th of November." I didn't have an answer for her then — and I still don't. But when I figure that one out, I can holler back about the meaning of Presidents Day.

Read the full post via TheRoot.com, and share your thoughts.

Singer/songwriter Asa was born in Paris but spent her childhood and adolescence in Lagos, Nigeria.

She returned to Paris as an adult to test her talent on the French music scene. But it was in Nigeria where Asa first discovered the sounds that would influence the music she creates.

On today's show, Tony Cox spoke with Asa about her burgeoning career, and then she performed her song "Jailer" for us in-studio. Below is a video excerpt of that interview and performance.

Minneapolis-born songbird Maiysha is a true blend of beauty and talent. The graduate of Sarah Lawrence College is a former model and teacher.

Now, Maiysha is a Grammy-nominated artist — recognized for her single, "Wanna Be." Her debut album, This Much is True, is a genre bender, mixing hip hop rhythms with jazz and funk grooves.

She spoke with host Tony Cox on today's show. Listen to the full interview, and watch her live, in-studio performance of "Wanna Be."

In the late 1960s, when assassinations shook this country to the core and race riots engulfed whole neighborhoods, Tim Reid and Tom Dreseen — one black and the other white — decided that America was ready for interracial comedy.

But most audiences didn't quite know what to make of them.

On Wednesday's show, Tony Cox spoke with Tim Reid and Tom Dreesen about their new book, which chronicles their partnership: Tim and Tom: An American Comedy in Black and White.

Click here to listen to that interview.