On August 29, 1935, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters signed its first contract with the Pullman Car Company, breaking that company’s long anti-union history and providing a breakthrough f
I was at the Newport Folk Festival when I heard that Bob Moses had died. As I will discuss in this weekend’s Music Notes post, this was a festival heavily dedicated to Black artists. No one ment
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.
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
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 C
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
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
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