Portside

A new book about the abolitionist movement puts African Americans in the center of the history of our country's movement to end slavery.

"Letters from Langston: From the Harlem Renaissance to the Red Scare and Beyond" is both a compilation of an intriguing exchange of letters among five heroic African Americans and a loving tribute to the letter writers from the daughters of four of the writers: Evelyn Louise Crawford and MaryLouise Patterson.

In this new book, Thomas Frank offers an analysis of today's Democratic Party that should serve as a cautionary tale for its supporters in this election year. Writing from the United Kingdom, Adam Barnett offers an appraisal of Frank's findings.

Matthew Desmond is an academic who teaches at Harvard - a sociologist or, you could say, an ethnographer. But I would like to claim him as a journalist, and one who has set a new standard for reporting on poverty. In Milwaukee, he moved into a trailer park and then to a rooming house on the -poverty-stricken North Side and diligently took notes on the lives of people who pay 70 to 80 percent of their incomes for homes that are unfit for human habitation.

One of the cornerstones of the campaign Senator Bernie Sanders is waging for the presidency is his opposition to our corrupt campaign finance laws. He often names the Koch brothers as a prime exhibit of the dangers of unregulated big money in politics, and for good reason. In her new book, Jane Mayer traces how the Koch brothers are trying to buy our politics. Greg Waldmann introduces us to what Mayer has found.

The following excerpt is the Foreword to America's Addiction to Terrorism. Portside is pleased to share this with our readers. In the U.S. today, the term "terrorism" conjures up images of dangerous, outside threats: religious extremists and suicide bombers in particular. Harder to see but all the more pervasive is the terrorism perpetuated by the United States, itself, whether through military force overseas or woven into the very fabric of society at home.

This new book argues that W. E. B. Du Bois was the first of the USA's modern sociologists. Du Bois's empirically-based studies of African Americans at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries are models of sociological research. Aldon Morris details this legacy, which academic Sociology still does not universally acknowledge. In this review, Monica Bell considers the significance of Morris's argument.

Harper Lee's classic novel was one of hope, young hope. Her last, Go Set a Watchman, a sad acknowledgment of the incredible power of racial hate in my home state of Alabama, reveals that Atticus turns out to be a Kluxer! An example of how America, especially the American South, has yet to confront, admit, and rectify the original sin of legal racialism enshrined in our founding documents - three fifths of a person.

Some 85% of African American eighth graders cannot read at grade level, yet only seven percent of teachers are black and less than two percent of all teachers in our country's schools are black men. Former teacher Alvin Irby started Barbershop Books, a nonprofit, in response to this crisis. It brings books to barbershops in black communities, in a fight to raise literacy levels among black boys. The information below comes from the group's website.

Portraying her subject as a radical voice of the dispossessed, author Jacqueline Mulhallen presents the poet Shelley less as a romantic and more as a traitor to his own class for his revolutionary politics. Here is the Shelley who, though writing when the British working class was in its infancy, grasped and wanted to overturn the oppression under which they lived. It's that red Shelley who inspired among others Karl Marx, even as his poetry became part of the canon.