books

The Butler's Child - A Revolutionary Civil Rights Lawyer

Bob Zellner East Hampton Star (Long Island, NY)
The timeliness of The Butler's Child has just been demonstrated by the death of a black man in Baton Rouge at the hands of two ill trained young white police officers. Fifty years ago Steel thought of the Deep South as a dangerous and racist place. Today, however, it has become clear that racism and trigger-happy cops are national phenomena.

books

Nina Simone's Backlash Blues

John Lahr London Review of Books
A biography of the iconic Nina Simone. Using rare archival footage, audio recordings and interviews (including talks with her daughter and extracts from Simone's private diaries), this examination of her life highlights her musical inventiveness and unwavering quest for racial justice, while laying bare the personal demons that plagued her from the time of her Jim Crow childhood in North Carolina to her self-imposed exiles in Liberia and Paris.

Remembering Michael Ratner - The Loss of a Hero

Vince Warren; Sam Roberts; Bob Guild
We lost one of the great social justice warriors of our time, Michael Ratner. While a law student at Columbia University in 1968 this empathy and compassion helped him find his political focus during student protests against the Vietnam War. "[E]vents like this created the activists of the generation and I never looked back; I declared that I was going to spend my life on the side of justice and non-violence."

labor

Fighting for Racial Justice for Communities of Color

Tefere Gebre and Johanna Hester Medium.com
Their is a connection between mass incarceration and mass deportations. The broken prison system is linked to the conditions in detention centers and the overall mass criminalization of communities of color. The labor movement is a movement of second chances and firmly believes the criminal justice system in the United States needs to offer people another chance to contribute to and be full members of our society.

The Police Beating That Opened America's Eyes to Jim Crow's Brutality

Chris Lamb The Conversation
Over the years, Woodward’s beating receded behind more publicized stories like the lynching of Emmett Till. But with police brutality remaining a problem in many African-American communities today, it’s appropriate to highlight an important – and unappreciated – story of the civil rights movement.

February 4 - Rosa Parks Birthday; How History Got the Rosa Parks Story Wrong

Jeanne Theoharis The Washington Post
Rosa Parks was a lifelong activist who had been challenging white supremacy for decades before she became the famous catalyst for the Montgomery bus boycott. We see a woman who, from her youth, didn't hesitate to indict the system of oppression around her. As she once wrote, "I talked and talked of everything I know about the white man's inhuman treatment of the Negro." Today we honor her, as part of African American History Month.

Targeted Surveillance, Civil Rights, and the Fight for Democracy

Malkia Cyril Center for Media Justice
On October 13th 2015, Malkia Cyril, co-founder and Executive Director of the Center for Media Justice, gave a lunch speakers series keynote address, at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference. Below is the transcript of her speech.
Subscribe to Civil Rights