Dear Fellow Americans and Citizens of the Global Community:

We are pleased to invite you to continue sharing your thoughts and ideas, your hopes and dreams, your recommendations for the way forward as well as your assessment of our new President’s performance in governing. Your response to our earlier invitation and the publication of an initial volume associated with this project, Letters to President Obama in April, 2009, inspired us to extend the project and to follow President Obama’s first term in office.

We also propose to continue collecting selected letters that are uploaded onto this website for additional published volumes. You are invited to begin and/or to continue participating with your reflections by contributing letters to President Obama as he addresses the critical domestic and international threats to sustainable peace, harmony and societal well being. The economic crisis; wars in the Iraq and Afghanistan as well as those in the Middle East and in Africa and in Asia more broadly; the global food/agricultural crisis which includes famine and starvation; the crisis in education at the primary, secondary and tertiary levels; the housing crisis; climate change, global warming, potable water and environmental distress; the need for universal health care; poverty; unemployment; affordable child care; the death penalty and the prison industrial complex; the wellbeing of our children, the aged, and those with disabilities-- all warrant our immediate attention.

No one could have predicted even two years ago that Barack Obama had the prospect of taking the oath of office as President of the United States in January 2009. For many, an African-American rising to the most powerful position in our country is one of the most significant milestones of the Civil Rights Movement. For others, it is the opportunity to support someone who represents a modern, culturally diverse and progressive vision of what America can and should be in the twenty-first century. It also represents a move toward increased global collaboration and unity.

We hope that you will want to contribute your own words, thoughts, perspectives and dreams in a letter for this new era in our history to this website. If you decide to contribute a letter or if you decide not to, we still want to know the concerns and issues that you would like most for the new President to address.

The 'polls' section and the political cafe in the 'discussion' section of this web site are the places where you may also share your concerns and views on current political, social and economic dilemmas.

Thank you,

Professor Hanes Walton, Jr.
Professor Josephine A.V. Allen
Dr. Sherman C. Puckett
Professor Donald R. Deskins, Jr.