Black, Latino groups: It's our turn, Mr. President
From the piece:
On Monday, nearly 60 black leaders held a closed-door meeting in Washington to begin crafting an agenda to be delivered to the White House and Congress early next year. The leaders said the policies will be culled from five areas: economic inequality, education, health care, criminal justice and voting rights.
"Against the backdrop of high unemployment, a difficult set of economic challenges, a great deal of hope and promise that we have in our president's second term, we felt it was important for us to come together," Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League, told reporters after the meeting.
Morial's organization, along with the NAACP, the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation and the National Action Network, convened the event.
As the economy has slowly improved, the fortunes of many blacks and Latinos remain stalled. The nation's unemployment rate dropped in November to 7.7 percent, but remained at 10 percent for Hispanics and fell a percentage point, to 13.2 percent, for blacks.
