Portside

Sharp reductions in spending on police, prisons, and the Pentagon could free up hundreds of billions of dollars for programs that might begin to fill the gap in spending on public investments in communities of color and elsewhere.

As calls to defund police grow, peacemakers on the frontlines of Chicago’s gun violence epidemic have dramatically reduced homicides and shootings.

This is not the first time that an uprising against anti-Black racism has opened the door to significant change. There’s the little known rebellion of Black Air Force personnel at Travis Air Force Base in California in May 1971.

Do we want to provide care for the most vulnerable members of our society, or do we want this to just be a business where real estate owners are making money, and we don’t really care...

If the work of abolition is not only about stopping prisons, but also about imagining a future in which we win, then people cannot be released from prisons only to be put on the streets or to premature disability at the poultry factory.

SEIU, the Teamsters, AFT, CWA, UFCW, UNITE HERE, ATU and the UFW joined dozens of other labor and community organizations today in a national Strike for Black Lives. Meanwhile, unions are pushing the fight for racial justice beyond resolutions.

As American families fret over a patchwork set of standards for reopening schools that vary widely by city and state, teachers unions across the country are denouncing the Trump administration’s approach.

Author Caleb Carr's The Alienist explores the 19th century psychiatric debate between free will and determinism. TNT's nearly identical adaptation of the novel, however, comes up with a completely different conclusion.

There was slavery in Illinois for more than 100 years. Even after Illinois entered the Union, loopholes in its laws allowed the practice to continue, making the future Land of Lincoln a quasi-slave state. 

During the 19th century,the U.S. government encouraged the extermination of the bison as a means to subdue Native Americans and facilitate the country’s western expansion.