Portside

Social justice protest offers an indispensable and even inspiring view of US history. At the same time, movements for social change must be placed within their historical and social context. In truth, activists often have to rely on middle-class alliances in and out of the political establishment while forging compromises, even unsavory ones, before achieving success.

In every Southern state with the death penalty activists are working to abolish it. They include civil rights activists who focus on the system's racial bias, faith leaders who view the work as part of their ministry, and even family members of victims who seek closure but not vengeance.

"[The Democrats] need a counter-offer, one that's more compelling than the creaky status quo. They need a single-payer, Medicare-for-All plan."

Staying silent is to be complicit in perpetrating injustice

A political party cannot investigate itself. And clearly, Chairman Nunes no longer has the credibility to run the House investigation.

Bernie Sanders: We Beat Right-Wing Extremists Today. Inverted Beethoven. This Is Your Brain on Terrorism. Downbound Train | Chuck Berry. Grassroots Protest Set the Stage for ACHA's Defeat.

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Much commentary on the late Chuck Berry will focus on how his songs expressed fun and teenage angst. This is the right thing to do. Yet there’s more. For example, Berry’s obsession with the comparative qualities of fast cars — most brilliantly displayed in his song “Maybellene” — did not just reflect the rise of post-WW II consumerist culture....He preferred V-8 Fords over Cadillacs because he spent several years in the late 1940s and early 1950s helping make Ford cars.

After more than a half-century in the wilderness, the socialist left reemerges in America. Bernie Sanders helped give renewed meaning and salience to democratic socialism as a political identity. His emergence as the moral conscience of the American left was nearly impossible to anticipate. Perhaps the most important aspect of Sanders's run in the Democratic primary was cultural rather than electoral.

`It's exactly what the Old South was in America. Blacks knew where they could go: they could drink from that fountain, they couldn't go over there, they couldn't eat in that place,' the American actor tells an Israeli TV station during a tour of the segregated West Bank city.