As Police Commander's Trial Nears, a `Black in Blue' Legacy is in the Spotlight

Glenn Reedus Chicago Reporter
The trial of Police Commander Glenn Evans, which is scheduled to begin in December, highlights divisions in neighborhoods where crime is often highest and police misconduct complaints are frequent. Evans, a 28-year veteran of the Police Department, is accused of shoving the barrel of a gun down a man’s throat while simultaneously holding a stun gun to his genitals.

books

This Is Not Dixie: Racist Violence in Kansas, 1861-1927

Fred Whitehead Special to Portside
The history of racism in our country is sometimes best understood by looking at how that history unfolded locally, and in places outside the slaveholding South, as well as nationally. Fred Whitehead writes about his own experience growing up in Kansas in the 1950s and about what Brent M. S. Campney, in his new study of that state's bloody Civil War and Post-Civil War racial history, taught him.

books

An American Communist Saga

Paul Buhle Portside
Herbert Aptheker, to introduce the man by his highest prestige, was an early scholar of African American uprisings against slavery, and in his middle years, the director and coordinator of the W.E.B. DuBois Papers, one of the great archival triumphs of US history at large. For many in the 60s, through his books and public apperances, a generation became aware of the Communist Party, U.S.A.

Fight for Black Voting Rights Precedes the Constitution

Van Gosse Boston Globe
There’s a comforting myth in the United States that suggests African-Americans steadily moved from absolute slavery to complete freedom following the Civil War. This, however, obscures how hard many Americans of every race had fought against racism since the Revolution. It was a struggle that went deeper than slavery and right to the core of who was an American.

A Raised Voice

Claudia Roth Pierpont The New Yorker
How Nina Simone turned the movement into music.

The History of Black Cooperatives

Bernard Marszalek Counterpunch
African Americans have a long, rich history of cooperative ownership, especially in reaction to market failures and economic racial discrimination . . . My research suggests that African Americans, as well as other people of color and low-income people, have benefitted greatly from cooperative ownership and democratic economic participation throughout the history of the United States -- from the introduction to Collective Courage

Voting Rights at a Crossroads

Barbara Arnwine and Marcia Johnson-Blanco Economic Policy Institute
The Supreme Court Decision in Shelby Is the Latest Challenge in the ‘Unfinished March’ to Full Black Access to the Ballot

Pullman Porter Blues

John Olson Chicago Theater Beat
Play-with-music visits three generations of a family employed as porters and sets the action on June 22, 1937 a time of celebration and great hope for African-Americans. That night, Joe Louis beat James J. Braddock for the World Heavyweight Championship in Chicago. Later that year, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters signed its first collective bargaining agreement with the Pullman Company, improving work place conditions and increasing wages for the porters.
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