Portside

More than any of the other civil rights widows, Myrlie Evers showed America her rage. She let the nation see her unfiltered emotion when two all-white juries refused to convict Medgar’s killer, during a time when black anger was not an acceptable display of emotion. She wrote a book and began it with this line: “Somewhere in Mississippi lives the man who murdered my husband.”

Can photographers be participants in the social events they document? Eighty years ago the question would have seemed irrelevant in the political upsurges of the 1930s, in both Mexico and the United States. Many photographers were political activists, and saw their work intimately connected to workers strikes, political revolution or the movements for indigenous rights. Now a book and a recent exhibition should reopen this debate.

The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which occurred fifty years ago this August 28, remains one of the most successful mobilizations ever created by the American Left. Organized by a coalition of trade unionists, civil rights activists, and feminists—most of them African American and nearly all of them socialists—the protest drew nearly a quarter-million people to the nation’s capital. Yet the Left has not claimed the March as its legacy.

Forty-five years after King was killed supporting their historic strike, some of the same men who marched with him still pick up Memphis' garbage - and now they are fighting to hold on to jobs that some city leaders want to hand over to a private company.

Staughton Lynd's tribute to Herbert Shapiro, fellow historian and staunch civil rights and anti-racist activist.

Civil rights leader John Lewis recounts his remarkable life in a graphic novel trilogy