State of Black Union Celebrates its 10th Year

By: Jackie Jones

This year marks the 10th anniversary of Tavis Smiley’s "State of the Black Union," an annual forum designed to help empower the black community.

Previous forums and a trilogy of books focused on a covenant with black America that calls on self-help and commitments from elected officials, community leaders, corporations and American citizens themselves - particularly African-Americans - to improve the quality of life.

"Accountable: Making America As Good As Its Promise," the third book of the "Covenant" trilogy, co-authored by Smiley and "Tom Joyner Morning Show" commentator Stephanie Robinson, president and CEO of the Jamestown Project, a national think tank that focuses on democracy, features statistics and real-life anecdotes that explain how the nation’s current economic crisis is playing out.

“'The Covenant with Black America' was the what - the 10 things we wanted done. This book lays out the what before President Barack Obama was a candidate. The second book, 'The Covenant In Action,' was the how-do-we-tackle-this part, and the third book is the whether - the yardstick to measure whether we’re holding people to that agenda,” Smiley told BlackAmericaWeb.com.

“Equally as important,” Smiley said, “we lay out what we can do to help (Obama) achieve that agenda. I want Barack Obama to be a great president.”

Although Smiley took heat from a number of quarters last year for raising questions about what then-candidate Obama was committed to doing to help the black condition, he said he was simply raising the questions that he believed black people needed to ask to ensure their issues would be addressed.

Some of the heat, he said, was based on a fear by some black people that to say anything that could be construed as negative about Obama would diminish his chances for becoming president.

State of Black Union Celebrates its 10th Year....