Portside

The expected anti-union Janus decision is bad news but unlikely to be a disaster for unions and may even be the wake-up call that they need. Janus is the Roman god of transitions, and this may be a big one for the labor movement.

Southern Foodways Alliance talks about the food and drink culture of the South and tells stories that hope to change people’s perceptions and understandings about the South.

At the end of the Smithsonian Channel’s Lost Tapes: Malcolm X, Ossie Davis delivers a stirring eulogy for Malcolm X, the fallen Muslim minister and human rights activist. “And we will know him then for what he was and is,” Davis intones, “a Prince – our own black shining Prince!”

In the fall of 2017, radical anti-abortion activists debuted the Red Rose Rescues, bent on disrupting what they see as a stale political movement. Their goal is to be able to stop individual abortions without violating federal law. And so far, they are getting away with it.

Black undocumented immigrants have been at the unfortunate intersection of the Trump Administration’s anti-black, Islamophobic and xenophobic agenda. The issues surrounding immigration do not only live within the Latinx, Muslim and Asian communities. We need to stop working in silos and change the narrative to be more inclusive, concentrating on ALL communities in need of our attention. Immigration is a black issue.

Becky Rafter could have been among the 67% of white women voters in Alabama who cast their lot with Roy Moore. She grew up all over the South, including an Alabama small town shaped by white flight. Reared in a household of modest means in rental housing, her parents budgeted every dollar. Their financial planning, aid, and scholarships allowed her to sometimes attend private school, with the added help of white privilege. Maybe it was growing up queer in the South or the dissonance of the segregated societies of her childhood.

In early February, the existence of a draft Department of Homeland Security (DHS) report came to light, which calls for long-term surveillance of Sunni Muslim immigrants.

Workers at Trump’s Vegas hotel voted to unionize last December after several months of campaigning. A labor agreement, though, was slow to materialize until last week, when over a few days, union representatives and Trump Organization executives negotiated a four-year contract, taking effect Jan. 1, that will cover roughly 520 housekeepers, bartenders, servers, porters and other staff at the hotel.

This past July, the Federal Detention Center instituted a policy that makes inmate visits even more difficult: It limited visits to immediate family only. Practically speaking, the policy cuts off inmates from the people they love at precisely the moment they need those connections most.

Albert Murray (1916-2013), was the kind of intellectual for whom Duke Ellington would write a book jacket blurb. He called the African American writer and esteemed cultural critic “a man whose learning did not interfere with understanding," in praise of Murray's 1975 book Train Whistle Guitar, adding that Murray was "the unsquarest person I know." The Library of America has published new volume of Murray's writing. Greg Thomas takes a look.