Portside

Activists are often held up as exemplars of personal morality — but in every social struggle, ordinary people with complex lives rise up as leaders. Ivory Perry was one of these who waged a relentless war for racial and economic justice.

Martin Luther King's speeches from 1954's Montgomery Bus Boycott to the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Strike. Compiled by Abdul Alkalimat, Prof Emeritus Dept of African American Studies and School of Information Sciences, Univ of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

It’s not enough for students to simply learn about the sit-ins or Freedom Rides. SNCC’s organizing campaigns need to be at the center of civil rights curriculum.

August 28th was the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington. Ignore the lies and distortions — the reality, as the latest research shows, is that scores of socialists influenced or were themselves key figures in the civil rights movement.

Every now and then, a voice can matter. Mahalia Jackson had one of them.

Patrick Braxton, first Black mayor of Newbern, small town in Alabama’s Black Belt region, filed federal civil rights lawsuit alleging the white former mayor and city council members violated the Constitution when they locked him out of the Town Hall

In an eye-opening documentary The League, director Sam Pollard tells a fully-rounded tale of how Black baseball used to thrive. By the 1940s, baseball was the third largest economic institution in Black communities.

' No accommodation to racism' in 1905. Smoking causes lung cancer in 1957. Nixon on tape, really? in 1973. FBI admits to burglaries in 1975. CIA admits to more bad behavior in 1977. Forgetting about the Civil War 1917. One last nuke test in 1962.

Affirmative action is now a policy of the past. Something far more powerful than affirmative action is still needed. The vision of Randolph, Rustin and King offers a clue towards a solutions.