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Remembering Ella Baker on Martin Luther King Day

Barbara Ransby The New York Times
Ella Baker Baker was a strategist, organizer and mother to the movement whose political acumen, humble leadership style and razor sharp political insights were legendary.

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Kathy Engel Youtube
New York poet Kathy Engel responds to the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute’s rescinding an award to Angela Davis.

"I Question America" -- Remembering Fannie Lou Hamer's Famous Speech 50 Years Ago

Peter Dreier Huffington Post
To understand both the progress America has made, and the many challenges it now faces, in terms of racial justice, it is useful to remind ourselves of the battle that occurred a half century ago and the life of Fannie Lou Hamer, a sharecropper and activist from the Mississippi Delta who galvanized the country with her stirring words and her remarkable courage.

Lee Lorch, Desegregation Activist, Dies at 98

David Margolick New York Times
Lee Lorch, a soft-spoken mathematician whose leadership in the campaign to desegregate Stuyvesant Town, the gargantuan housing development on the east side of Manhattan, helped make housing discrimination illegal nationwide.

Rosa Parks' Stamp on American History

Jeanne Theoharis The Root
Today, to honor the Feb. 4 centennial of the birth of Rosa Parks, the United States Postal Service has issued a Rosa Parks stamp. Yet these tributes to Rosa Parks rest on a narrow and distorted vision of her legacy. A more thorough accounting of Parks' political life offers a different set of reasons for the nation to honor her. A lifetime of steadfastness and outrage, tenacity and bravery, is what deserves national veneration.
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