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My 9-year-old little sister has a girl-crush on Michelle Obama.

When Imani sees the Harvard-educated lawyer on the news racks, she breaks into a smile and announces, "There's Michelle Obama!"

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Too many Roanoke teenage girls find pregnancy intoxicating.

Last year, the city recorded the second-highest teen pregnancy rate in Virginia.

These girls bask in the attention showered on pending motherhood. They're giddy at the arrival of the baby and the accompanying afterglow.

But a year down the road, reality can feel like a bad hangover. Read more »

A dark mahogany, butter-soft leather sofa beckons visitors into the homey room just inside the door of Roanoke's Blue Ridge Women's Center.

A throw blanket is casually draped across the back of the sofa; it's the same color as the cranberry red pillows perched on nearby leather upholstered chairs. The warm mocha walls are bathed in soft lamp lighting, and a television perched overhead is barely audible.

The sitting room at the Christian-based, pro-life women's center on Williamson Road is comfortable, cozy and welcoming.

The room at the Blue Ridge center is a different side of a movement often typified by attention-seeking protesters outside abortion clinics or in human chains along busy roads.

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The pair of sweat pants that Amelia Gaines got as a gift a couple of Christmases ago was well-received -- until she turned them around.

Emblazoned across the backside in broad letters was the word "Cheer."

Amelia's mother, LeVita Washington, didn't have to say a word. She let grandma do the talking.

"I don't want anything across their tail," Washington recounted her mother saying of 11-year-old Amelia and her older sister DeAnna, 12.

With that, Amelia's new pants went to Goodwill.

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Multiple sclerosis is a disease on the down low.

The central nervous system disorder afflicts 400,000 Americans and can cause numbness, tingling, blindness or paralysis. But MS patients don't have their own weekend telethon, the way Jerry's Kids do.

It largely afflicts women but doesn't have its own color the way breast cancer does. B-list celebrities such as Annette Funicello and Montel Williams have MS. But they don't attract the public awareness or sympathy that Michael J. Fox does for Parkinson's.

Even many with MS don't talk openly about it.

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As the top cop at the Roanoke sheriff department, George McMillan was straight out of central casting.

Large and imposing. Gregarious and effusive.

Whether the next election was a month or two years away, McMillan spent his off hours campaigning for the job. He was an enthusiastic and accessible fixture at community functions -- a minority job fair, a Little League baseball game, a parade. Friendly, hand-shaking, confident.

In an elected position, McMillan was the consummate politician.

But this week, the testimony of woman after woman in a sexual harassment case made him out to be a predator -- a serial groper who preyed upon women who worked for him or who wanted to.

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Rehema Ellis is a veteran journalist and NBC network correspondent who has covered just about every story imaginable. Firefighters, the environment, education, the pope and flex-time for working moms, just to name a few.

But a five-part series beginning tonight on "NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams" strikes an intensely personal chord. Ellis is the lead reporter in the series called "African-American Women: Where They Stand."

"I'm an African-American woman," Ellis said in a phone conversation Saturday from her office at NBC headquarters in New York. "This is my story."

She added, "This is an American story."

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As a black woman, Tracey Wilson of Roanoke wants America to know that black women "raise our children with morals and values."

Marilyn Kershaw of Blacksburg wants America to know, "I am an independent thinker. I think of myself as a woman, then as a black woman. I have very much an affinity for my race."

Her daughter Njeri, 25, asks her fellow countrymen to understand that though she is educated and working on a graduate degree, she, too, has to "go through struggles."

Rosalyn Robinson, 49, of Columbia, S.C., implores America not to politically pigeonhole her. She isn't yet backing anyone for president. She has no particular allegiance to Hillary because she's a woman nor to Barack because he's black.

"I have problems with both of them," said the substitute teacher visiting Roanoke last week.

These black women reflect the myriad of opinions and voices of a demographic too often muted in our country and whose successes and challenges too often are dismissed or overlooked.

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The shooting deaths four years ago of a young mother and her three children simultaneously broke Roanoke's heart and served as a chilling reminder.

After Angela Arrington and her children were mercilessly gunned down in their home, the Rev. Bill Lee of Loudon Avenue Christian Church urged women in his congregation to know, really know, the men they were bringing into their lives -- and by extension, their homes.

The shooter had been Arrington's boyfriend, who lived with her sometimes.

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Hillary Clinton is no pansy.

Do I need to remind everyone this is the same woman who thought nothing of offending the card-carrying devotees of the Country Music Association with her Tammy Wynette "Stand by your man" sacrilege?

And for good measure, she blasphemed Ms. Toll House in another interview.

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