A week before he died in 1973, Lyndon Johnson sat down for a long interview about his civil rights record. It was the last interview he ever gave. It’s worth hearing him talk about all this.
Tag: civil rights
I was reading the obituary today for Jack Geiger, the socially minded doctor who put his expertise to use in order to solve poverty. It’s really fascinating. In 1970, a documentary called Out in
Gloria Richardson is one of the great heroes of the civil rights movement. But she is far too forgotten about today. Her work in the movement in Maryland was one of the most important moments of the 1
When I was reading Andrew Sandoval-Strausz’s book Barrio America in preparation for the podcast with him, I noticed he mentioned a 1961 film titled Dallas at the Crossroads. Narrated by Walter Cronkite, this was an attempt by the civic leaders of Dallas to tell its citizens not to protest desegregation with riots like had just […]
This is the grave of Jonathan Daniels. Born in 1939 in Keene, New Hampshire, Daniels was a young man moved by duty. He grew up Congregationalist but while he went to college at Virginia Military Insti
Bill Clinton decided to use John Lewis’ funeral to take a shot at Stokely Carmichael. The last thing we need is whites to use such opportunities to tell histories of the civil rights movements t
One of the worst parts of the grotesque and false right-wing attacks on Shirley Sherrod back in 2010 is that she had been an activist for Black land ownership for many years. She and her husband were founders of the New Communities farm, a Black collective farming enterprise in rural Georgia that came out of […]
On September 29, 1962, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference announced Operation Breadbasket, a boycott campaign against companies that refused to hire African-Americans. This was part of the l
What a racial paradise. The cars came one by one, down a gravel road and through a cotton field, to the edge of the Tallahatchie River and the spot where, 64 years ago, historians believe Emmett Tillâ
This is the grave of Robert and Mabel Williams. Born in 1925 in Monroe, North Carolina, Robert Williams grew up as part of the black working class. His father was the washer of a railroad boiler. He came from a civil rights background, as his grandfather had run a newspaper during Reconstruction in favor of […]
This is the grave of Julian Bond. Born in 1940 in Nashville to Horace Mann Bond and Julia Bond, Julian grew up in a household where education mattered more than anything. His father was a college pres
This is the grave of Andrew Goodman. Born in 1943 in New York, he grew up in a liberal Jewish family committed to social justice issues. After spending a short time at the University of Wisconsin, he