On this date in 1925, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was founded. Led by A. Philip Randolph, this labor union became the most important civil rights organization in mid-20th century America, arguably as important as the NAACP. Racism shut most jobs to black people in the early 20th century, but the Pullman Company was […]
Tag: civil rights
That is not the Seattle Mariners record for the month of July (bless the continued existence of the Kansas City Royals) but the win/loss record for same sex marriage in the league of direct democracy.
Given the times we live in, it’s worth recognizing those who believed that gay rights was the next phase of the rights struggle when many did not. Such as Huey Newton. From an August 15, 1970 sp
On this date in 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated by James Earl Ray while in Memphis to support a strike by the city’s sanitation workers. In the spring of 1968, Martin Luther King was organizing his Poor People’s Campaign. Hoping to bring attention to the plight of the impoverished around the country, unite […]
I would like to buck the conventional wisdom, but I agree with everybody that the grant of cert in Fisher v. UT Austin is almost certainly the end of affirmative action in higher education. Certainly,
We should perhaps celebrate the real MLK, as opposed to the complacent defender of purely formal equality that conservatives would prefer to imagine him as: At the end of his all too short life, Dr. M
Gordon Hirabayashi, a civil rights hero who was arrested while attending my alma mater and ended his career teaching at my native province’s flagship university, passed away at age 93. He was the last survivor of the three courageous people who refused to comply with racist internment orders during World War II, leading to negative-landmark […]
Most of us have a strong impression of Black Power–dudes in sunglasses and afros holding big guns and talking about violence. That was the impression that a lot of left-leaning white people had
Michael Medved argues: “Nevertheless, Brewer met justice nine years more promptly than the African-American, Davis. In any just society, the race of the perpetrator—or victim—should have no
I suspect Paul will have more to say about the passing of this giant of the American legal academy. The same could be said about almost any paragraph in his obit, but this one seems particularly instructive about both American politics and Bell’s rare integrity: In his 20s, while working at the Civil Rights Division […]
Sad loss of one of the last living great civil rights leaders from the minister-dominated wing of the movement. Shuttlesworth was most noted for his organization of the Birmingham actions, but through
I have a column for the Prospect arguing that Scalia’s evaluation of the discrimination claims in Wal-Mart v. Dukes is part of a long-running conservative con: The problem with ignoring statisti