Portside

Freedom Summer 50th is a five-day convening to learn from the past, evaluate our present, and strategize for the future. The international conference and youth congress will be held June 25th - 29th, 2014 in Jackson, Mississippi on the campus of Tougaloo College. Work sessions will examine each issue area and explore its context in the present-day struggle for justice not only in Mississippi, but globally.

Dr. Vincent G. Harding, Civil Rights pioneer, colleague, advisor and speechwriter for Dr. Martin Luther King, died this week at age 82. He drafted King's anti-Vietnam War speech, "Breaking the Silence". As people like King and Rosa Parks became icons, Harding insisted that America could not celebrate their lives without continuing to devote ourselves to the work they and many others had done.

Reader Comments - Keystone XL; Sid Caesar; Venezuela; UAW and Volkswagen; Bernie Sanders Run for President?; Chris Hedges; Nixon, Reagan and Sabotage of Peace; Healthcare; Love and Loneliness; Song for Pete Seeger; Announcements: -Remembering Freedom Summer and the Civil Rights Era - New York - Feb. 22; Teleconference on 'Moving Beyond Capitalism' - Feb. 24

Women in the image machine; Arab idol gets the boot; French cultural workers throw down; Civil rights heroes digitized; AIPAC takes a blow

During Black History Month, let’s not forget the speech-stifling history of US government spying that has targeted communities of color.

Seeger is famous, of course, for making “We Shall Overcome” a civil and human rights anthem. The story of where he found that song is told below by historian Christopher Phelps. It is excerpted, by permission, from Christopher Phelps, "Lefts Old and New: Sixties Radicalism, Now and Then," in A New Insurgency: The Port Huron Statement and Its Times, eds. Howard Brick and Gregory Parker (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming).

It took years of political evolution for King to understand nonviolence not merely as a moral force, but as an effective strategy for leveraging political change. Yet his embrace of that idea allowed him to shape history.

Davey D speaks with activist, scholar and freedom fighter Angela Davis about the 50th anniversary of the 16th street Birmingham bombings of 1963.

The message of the march still resonated in 1965, when Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, Medicare and Medicaid, key features of President Lyndon B. Johnson's proposal to bring "an end to poverty and racial injustice." The march was so successful that we often forget that it occurred in a political environment not so different from our own. As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the march, however, its central achievements are more imperiled than ever.