Skip to main content

African American Anti-Fascists in the Spanish Civil War

Peter Carroll Black Past
Anti-fascist volunteer Canute Frankson explained his motivation in a letter home in 1937: “We will build us a new society—a society of peace and plenty. There will be no color line, no jim-crow trains, no lynching. That is why, my dear, I’m here in Spain.”

Racial Wealth Divide Snapshot: Women and the Racial Wealth Divide

Dedrick Asante-Muhammad Prosperity Now
The historical legacy of the racial wealth divide when combined with gender inequality makes women of color uniquely economically insecure. The greatest socio-economic disparities for most women of color are rooted in racial inequality, which is then worsened by smaller but significant gendered disp

Prologue to Greatness: W.E.B. Du Bois and Great Barrington

David Levering Lewis Portside
Du Bois biographer David Levering Lewis delivered a speech during the Du Bois 150th Birthday Celebration. Du Bois at age 95 was more radically unorthodox than virtually any other engaged intellectual of the 20th century. The real problem was really the manipulation of race in the service of wealth.

Labor and the Long Seventies

Lane Windham interview by Chris Brooks Jacobin
In the tumultuous 1970s, women and people of color streamed into unions, strikes swept the country — and employers launched a fierce counter-attack.

books

Why Do White People Like What I Write?

Pankaj Mishra London Review of Books
Writers once busy in prestigious magazines rationalizing war and torture are now confronting the obdurate pathologies of American life that stem from America’s original racial sin. Coates wonders why those once fierce in defending bloody imperial missions now embrace him for describing American power from the rare standpoint of its internal victims. Yet the danger for Coates is not so much seduction by power as a distorted perspective caused by proximity to it.

books

The Captive Aliens Who Remain Our Shame

Annette Gordon-Reed The New York Review of Books
This "very important" book offers a new examination of the role of African Americans in the American Revolution and of how racism was used in the service of creating the United States in the late 18th Century.

Tidbits - November 2, 2017 - Reader Comments: U.S. Troops in Africa; Indonesian Slaughter; Puerto Rico Recovery; NAACP: Avoid Flying American Airlines; Stevie Wonder; Japanese Internment - Exhibit, Film, Lessons for Today; and more...

Portside
Reader Comments: U.S. Armed Forces in Africa - Why?; 1965 Indonesia Slaughter; Puerto Rico Recovery, by Puerto Ricans; Whitefish Energy Scandal; NAACP Urges Black Passengers to Avoid Flying American Airlines; Stevie Wonder Sang the National Anthem on His Knees; Lost Mural by Secret Communist Unearthed; Abortion Resources; Then They Came For Me - Chicago exhibit until November 19; Join George Takei for premiere of "And Then They Came for Us"; and more.....

What Killed the Democratic Party?

William Greider The Nation
A new report offers a bracing autopsy of the 2016 election—and lays out a plan for revitalization.
Subscribe to African Americans