Portside

Martin Luther King's speeches from 1954's Montgomery Bus Boycott to the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Strike. Compiled by Abdul Alkalimat, Prof Emeritus Dept of African American Studies and School of Information Sciences, Univ of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

In the early 1900s, Ford Motor Company commanded strong loyalty from Detroit’s black workers. But the United Auto Workers broke Ford’s stranglehold through patient organizing, cementing an alliance that would bear fruit for decades.

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.