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How Mississippi Freedom Summer 1964 Can Inspire Us in 2024

Eddie Wong Convergence
Everything about this moment cries out for a bold intervention like SNCC knew they had to make in 1963. Their clarity and creativity offers a major lesson to our current stalemate between the multiracial democratic forces and the MAGA authoritarians.

This Week in People’s History, Jan 16–22

Portside
Storefronts covered with signs promoting prohibition
Prohibition Gets Started (in 1919), Slave Owners Get Nervous (1834), Swing Comes to the Opera House (1944), Repression Takes Practice (1934), Nazis Make a Reality of Wage Slavery (1934), Wilmington Occupation Ends (1969), Voting Rights Victory (1964)

Ivory Perry, the Forgotten Civil Rights Hell-Raiser

Devin Thomas O’Shea Jacobin
Activists are often held up as exemplars of personal morality — but in every social struggle, ordinary people with complex lives rise up as leaders. Ivory Perry was one of these who waged a relentless war for racial and economic justice.

King Dream Rooted in Labor’s Rising

Bob Hennelly Insider NJ
This Martin Luther King Day comes just weeks after a year that’s been dubbed ‘the year of the strike’ because in 2023 there were well over 300 such work stoppages involving 450,000 union workers willing to take the risk of walking out . . .

The Discovery of Europe

Álvaro Enrigue The New York Review of Books
A new book investigates the lives of the hundreds of thousands of indigenous Americans who were brought to or traveled to Europe in the sixteenth century—a story central to the beginning of globalization.