Two huge losses of civil rights movement legends this week. First Amiri Baraka died. Then Franklin McCain, one of the Greensboro 4 that sparked the student wing of the civil rights movement. There’s been a lot of remembrances of Baraka, so I’ll focus on McCain for a second. While it’s important to remember that they […]
Tag: civil rights
The increasingly common multiracial faces of America, via National Geographic. I’m sure all the old white people in Alabama who are hearing Spanish at their favorite buffet restaurants, the old
Jesse Jackson on Sesame Street, 1971. I especially like the line affirming those on welfare. Which I wish was still a relatively robust program, hey thanks Bill Clinton for making political points on
Edward Bland’s 1959 documentary The Cry of Jazz is one of the most remarkable films I’ve ever seen. An early statement of the black nationalism that would become famous in the late 60s, Bland argues in this 30 minute film that only African-Americans have the soul and history to play jazz and that whites need […]
This is a guest post by Robert Widell, who is unlucky enough to be my colleague in the history department at the University of Rhode Island, yet still watches Oregon crush Tennessee with me despite hi
Maybe so Lyndon. But it didn’t last forever. Now we have to overcome again. John Lewis on what the Court decision means, stabbing the civil rights movement “in its very heart.”
Shortly after midnight on June 12, 1963, NAACP leader Medgar Evers was assassinated in front of his home by white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith. Today marks the 50th anniversary of this tragedy.
Ari Berman with an excellent article on John Lewis and how the Supreme Court’s likely overturning of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act is a national repudiation of what he fought his entire lif
The end of an era in Boston, as school busing is officially ended. It’s true that busing didn’t really work very well. It was a clunky approach to a horrible problem of school inequality.
On January 25, 1941, A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and the most important civil rights leader of the World War II era, called for a March on Washington to protest discrimination in defense industry work. The success of this movement in convincing the government to act on employment discrimination […]
I’ve been thinking more about issues surrounding what I see as progressives’ lack of understanding around how to organize for the change they want. See here, but to reiterate, too many pro
Angus Johnston with a provocative post commemorating the 49th anniversary of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham. First, the girls who were killed that day weren’t small childr