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."
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
We lost one of the great social justice warriors of our time, Michael Ratner. While a law student at Columbia University in 1968 this empathy and compassion helped him find his political focus during student protests against the Vietnam War. "[E]vents like this created the activists of the generation and I never looked back; I declared that I was going to spend my life on the side of justice and non-violence."
Their is a connection between mass incarceration and mass deportations. The broken prison system is linked to the conditions in detention centers and the overall mass criminalization of communities of color. The labor movement is a movement of second chances and firmly believes the criminal justice system in the United States needs to offer people another chance to contribute to and be full members of our society.
Over the years, Woodward’s beating receded behind more publicized stories like the lynching of Emmett Till. But with police brutality remaining a problem in many African-American communities today, it’s appropriate to highlight an important – and unappreciated – story of the civil rights movement.
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