Robert N. Rhodes, Professor Emeritus of African American Studies, passed away December 2015. He began his career as an activist and concluded it at Ohio University, where he inspired generations of students.
Recounts the short, complicated history of the Black Panther Party. Using remarkable black-and-white archival footage, the current voices of more than twenty former Panthers, a former FBI agent, several retired police officers, a number of Panther lawyers and community activists, and a collection of historians and accompanied by some soul stirring period music, the lessons to those engaged in today’s struggles against racism and for justice are there for all to see.
The numbers tell us that the African American upper middle and upper classes are little more than a sliver of those classes as a whole. In what Rebecca Hussey calls a "formally innovative" new memoir, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Margo Jefferson shows us what it is like to have grown up in this tiny world during the latter half of the last century.
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.
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.
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.
“Victims can be perpetrators, too.” It’s important for people to understand that.
This weekend, the Art Institute of Chicago is commemorating the famed and controversial Wall of Respect, which celebrated black achievement, with a symposium and other events.
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.
How Nina Simone turned the movement into music.
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