Where can African Americans find this lost golden age? Do we discover it during the first centuries of the Republic when slavery was the law of the land? Do we fast forward to the Red Summer, Jim Crow laws, “strange fruit” hanging from poplar trees?
Across the political spectrum, Americans whitewash the working class and exclude labor struggle from black history. Blair LM Kelley’s Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class is a necessary corrective — and provides lessons for struggle today
The I-81 project, completed in 1968—and Syracuse remains one of the most segregated cities in the country, with the highest concentration of poverty among communities of color, and the highest rates of lead poisoning in children. This was by design.
In an eye-opening documentary The League, director Sam Pollard tells a fully-rounded tale of how Black baseball used to thrive. By the 1940s, baseball was the third largest economic institution in Black communities.
The Roberts two-step. He takes racism, a system of subjugation and social control, and removes the racists. What’s left is the mark of racism - race. A landmark case about the legitimacy of race hierarchy becomes, the use of race in school placement.
In the 1940s, a series of books tried to use the conventions of detective fiction to expose the degree of prejudice in postwar America. Their books — along with Sinatra’s song and film; Richard Wright’s memoir, coincided with a surge of activism.
Paul Peart-Smith, Paul Buhle, and Herb Boyd provide the world with their masterful graphic adaptation and edited interpretation of W. E. B. Du Bois’s great scholarly The Souls of Black Folk - “The Souls of Black Folk: In Its Time…and Ours.”
The Supreme Court ruled race-based college admissions are unlawful, ending affirmative action programs at colleges. In her dissent, Supreme Court justice Ketanji Brown Jackson pulled no punches calling the ruling “let-them-eat-cake obliviousness.”
Jonathan Eig’s new Martin Luther King biography stirs exhilaration and visceral pain at the unexpected triumphs and vicious violence that he and the freedom movement endured. It largely leaves out a key piece of King’s legacy: his commitment to labor
“People who truly believe in justice and equality, and peace and socialism, should not actually really care whether their contributions are individually noted,” Angela Davis asserted at a tribute to her friend and mentor, Charlene Mitchell, in 2009.
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