Portside

Union members from across the country have donated time and resources to Flint -- helping provide a sense of humanity to a community that needs it. The one-two punch of auto plants moving to places like Mexico, combined with the further economic damage of the Great Recession, means that this city which once had a population of 200,000 now has half that number, 40% of whom live at or below the poverty level.

Reader Comments: Fukushima Five Years Later; Clinton and Black Voters; Trump - Fascist; Bernie and Women; Misrepresenting the Working Class: Protest and Trump; In Praise of Impractical Movements; Why Virginia's Open Shop Referendum Should Matter; Protest Against Closing Down the Lukács Archives; Announcements: Welcome Federation of Cuban Women; CUNY Writers Against Austerity; Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire Commemoration; "Food Chains" Film Screening; and more...

Petitioning Attorney General Lynch and President Obama: Exonerate our mother, Ethel Rosenberg. Our mother was not a spy, and her execution was wrongful. Her conviction was based on perjured testimony and prosecutorial and judicial misconduct. The charges against our mother and the threat of the death penalty were meant to intimidate her and our father into cooperating. Sign te petition (below) -

Black History Month is a time for looking back on the civil rights movement and the lives of its pioneers. One of them was a man whose name is far less widely known than those of Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks or James Farmer. He was Bayard Rustin, whom some have sought to celebrate in recent years as an unsung hero of the movement, one who never received his due recognition because he was gay.

Public schools in recent years have sustained assaults from believers in the privatization of the public education system. The powers that be plan a data-based reinvention of teacher education that will require the closing, or reinvention of colleges of teacher education. If these plans go through, a majority of the nation's teachers and teacher educators could lose their jobs in the next 10 years, replaced by people who will largely be temp workers-making minimum wages

Call to action was written by Adriana Garriga-López, Ph.D. (Kalamazoo College), and Shir Lerman, M.A., M.P.H., PhD Candidate (University of Connecticut), with Jessica Mulligan, Ph.D. (Providence College), Alexa Dietrich, Ph.D., M.P.H. (Wagner College), Carlos E. Rodríguez-Díaz, PhD, MPHE, MCHES (University of Puerto Rico), and Ricardo Vargas-Molina, M.A. (University of Puerto Rico). The authors are members of the Society for Medical Anthropology's Zika Interest Group.

Some progressives joined with the racist, reactionary right in opposing Evo Morales' bid for another term in office. They forgot that a ‘Yes’ for Evo was a yes for the longer history of struggle and hope for its future. As the gas bonanza enters difficult days, we can hope that the progressive ‘No’ of the NGOs and the bookish classes can return to the popular ‘Yes’ of the movements. For those on the edges of society, Evo had come to mean hope and possibility.

The punditry is already rushing to crown Clinton the Democratic winner. However, the growing divide among Democrats between the older and the younger deserves more attention. The Clinton campaign people are certain that the threat posed by Trump or Cruz will help mobilize Democratic turnout. But a party whose leaders are selling more of the same may well find it hard to inspire young voters and independents who are looking for a very new deal.

Robin D.G. Kelley makes the case that the university is not an engine of social transformation, activism is. He opens a debate published by the Boston Review. Respondents include: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Barbara Ransby, Charlene Carruthers, Michael Eric Dyson and others.

Black youth-led groups organizing for justice played a key role in Kim Foxx’s win in the Cook County state’s attorney’s race Tuesday night. And they’re showing no signs of slowing down.