Portside

Honoring King's vision and legacy thus requires not simply remembering his most well-known dream: a racially inclusive society very different from the one that existed in his, or sadly, our own time. It requires recognizing the need to redistribute the power from the oppressive, exclusionary institutions, many of the same ones - housing, schools, criminal justice, the economy - he fought for until the day he was taken from us. What does honoring that vision mean today?

Reader Comments: Protests Should Also be Used for Organizing; Another Extreme Trump Nominee to Run National Intelligence; Top Prosecutor in Leonard Peltier Case Urges Clemency; Hidden Figures; Black Women and Civil Rights; It's Time to #TeachResistance: A Toolkit for Educators; Announcements and more....

The reason for today's powerful and persistent insistence that Black lives matter is based on the irrefutable evidence throughout American history that Black lives have never mattered. Black lives that were enslaved for 250 years never much mattered beyond the kind of economic concern held for livestock. Black lives that suffered a hundred years of brutal segregation and discrimination following slavery's abolition never mattered until Black people raised their voices...

Orlando Attack on LGBT, Puerto Rican and Latin communities; Thank You Bernie Sanders, Now, What Next?; Ending Mass Incarceration; Eliminating White Supremacy; Black-Palestinian Solidarity; U.S. Genocide Against Native Americans; Medicare for All; Demand Release of Homa Hoodfar; Victor Jara's Murderer to Face Charges; Bill Gates Gets Clucked in Bolivia; Announcements: Whitney Retrospective of photographer Danny Lyon; Activism in New York - book talk.

Reader Comments: Panama Papers fallout; Controversy over whites as part of the working class; Mine Safety and Blankenship Jail Sentence; Minimum wage hikes discussion; Bernie and labor, Wisconsin victory; Wall Street and Glass-Steagall; Hillary and labor, Wall Street and fracking; Pope Francis; Announcements: Gerald Horne book signings - Baltimore, Washington and New York; China Labor Relations; Communists in the Civil Rights Movement

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.