In the News

Last year, the Congressional Black Caucus launched the CBC Tech 2020 Initiative to address the lack of African American talent in the technology pipeline.  On its one-year anniversary, the initiative is still going strong.  Today, Congressional Black Caucus Chairman G. K. Butterfield (NC-01) and Congresswoman Barbara Lee (CA-13), co-chairs of the CBC Diversity… Read more »

Members of the Congressional Black Caucus on Thursday demanded answers from the home-sharing website Airbnb over allegations that African-American guests face discrimination when trying to rent a room or house through the site. “Racism and any form of discrimination should never be tolerated in our society,” said Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D-N.C.), who chairs the… Read more »

The Congressional Black Caucus is applauding the Justice Department's decision to investigate the Chicago Police Department, but says the decision is also "further proof" that bias by law enforcement is a real problem in the nation. "The multiple shooting incidents involving police in Chicago and across the country serve as further proof that bias and excessive use of… Read more »

Members of the Congressional Black Caucus traveled to Silicon Valley this week to deliver a message: Technology companies need to hire more black Americans. Caucus members met with some of the industry’s biggest employers — Apple, Google, Intel, SAP and Pandora — to seek an accounting of how these companies plan to achieve their stated goal of a more diverse workforce. “All of them are… Read more »

House Democrats on Thursday renewed their push for the restoration of a key provision of the Voting Rights Act that was struck down by the Supreme Court two years ago, arguing that Americans’ anger over polarizing symbols such as the Confederate flag should motivate Republicans to take “substantive action” to protect minority voting rights. The newest effort to put… Read more »

The recent events in Baltimore are all too familiar to those of us who lived through the late 1960s, when riots broke out in major U.S. cities. President Lyndon Johnson appointed the Kerner Commission in 1967 to investigate the conditions that led to those events. When the commission's report was released in the next year it concluded that "our nation is moving toward two societies, one… Read more »

Diversity in the tech world has been a problem for years, but only recently have companies begun to release data on just how skewed the numbers are. The vast majority of tech companies have an overwhelmingly white male workforce while Latinos and blacks make up as little as 4 percent. In an effort to increase minority participation in tech, the Congressional Black Caucus recently… Read more »

Yesterday, the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) hosted a live stream panel discussion event to launch CBC TECH 2020, a new initiative aimed at increasing African American representation and inclusion in the tech industry. Through it, the CBC seeks to close the gap by encouraging industry leaders "to use the same entrepreneurial spirit they use when creating new technologies to become… Read more »

The Congressional Black Caucus on Tuesday will launch a push to increase African American representation in the tech sector. The effort reflects concerns about a lack of diversity at companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter. “Many of the technology companies have African Americans as very loyal customers, and many of those don’t have any African Americans on their… Read more »

(CNN) Early this spring, we stood together with our colleagues in Congress, civil rights leaders and thousands of others on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, trying to imagine the incredible courage it must have once taken to simply walk across that bridge despite knowing with grim certainty that clubs, tear gas and fire hoses were waiting for you on the other side. We were… Read more »