Eyes on the Prize 2017: Not Your Grandma's Civil Rights Strategy - Whose Streets? (Then and Now)

Jon Else TomDispatch
Jon Else, was the series producer and cinematographer for the classic TV documentary on the civil rights movement, Eyes on the Prize. His new book, whose new book, True South, is a moving look at the civil rights movement through one man's life, frames our present grim moment in the context of that remarkable history. It's a past worth remembering as the protest movement of the twenty-first century finds its way in a grim world.

When Labor Fought for Civil Rights

Rich Yeselson Dissent Magazine
The new labor liberalism, built with the support of proportionally more non-white workers (and women), is more progressive than the old pre–civil rights era labor liberalism. If it achieves its powerful new vision, it will be a more humane, cosmopolitan, and egalitarian movement than its predecessor. But as of now, it is a significantly smaller movement and lacks economic and political leverage in key sectors of the political economy.

labor

Labor-Clergy Coalition To March on Nissan Plant in Mississippi

Tim Shorrock In These Times
Now Nissan workers are experiencing the brunt of those intimidation tactics, the Mississippi Alliance organizing this week's demonstration at Canton claims. Its website is filled with examples of unfair treatment. Signs at a recent protest organized by the UAW proclaimed, "Labor rights are civil rights."

film

‘Hidden Figures’ and Its Lessons for the Resistance

Brandon Tensley Pacific Standard Magazine
Theodore Melfi’s film about black women mathematicians is now the biggest movie in America — just in time to teach us crucial lessons for a Trump presidency. So what’s to be done? Hidden Figures offers a crystal-clear answer: Resist.

labor

MLK's Advice on Strike Strategy Still Relevant Today

Rand Wilson The Stansbury Forum
King’s strategic advice to the striking Memphis sanitation workers is still useful: winning requires placing the struggle in a larger context that challenges elected officials and government at every level to make America a better nation!

books

When Labor Fought for Civil Rights

Rich Yeselson Dissent Magazine
In reviewing two new books on the 20th Century's intertwined histories of labor, the Democratic Party, the Civil Rights movement, and the African American people, Rich Yeselson offers a nuanced and deeply informed assessment of this complicated tale.

Seizing Freedom: David Roediger with Peter St. Clair

David Roediger with Peter St. Clair Brooklyn Rail
The North won the Civil War, but the South won the Reconstruction. The victorious Northern armies preserved the Union and the slaves were emancipated but the Confederates won the historical interpretation of those events by perpetrating the myths that became the accepted story over the next one hundred years.

books

The Butler's Child - A Revolutionary Civil Rights Lawyer

Bob Zellner East Hampton Star (Long Island, NY)
The timeliness of The Butler's Child has just been demonstrated by the death of a black man in Baton Rouge at the hands of two ill trained young white police officers. Fifty years ago Steel thought of the Deep South as a dangerous and racist place. Today, however, it has become clear that racism and trigger-happy cops are national phenomena.

books

Nina Simone's Backlash Blues

John Lahr London Review of Books
A biography of the iconic Nina Simone. Using rare archival footage, audio recordings and interviews (including talks with her daughter and extracts from Simone's private diaries), this examination of her life highlights her musical inventiveness and unwavering quest for racial justice, while laying bare the personal demons that plagued her from the time of her Jim Crow childhood in North Carolina to her self-imposed exiles in Liberia and Paris.
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