Portside

Reader Comments - People's Climate March, Greening of the Labor Movement, What Next; ISIS, Syria, Iraq, Muslim Fundamentalism; Ongoing War in Middle East; Elizabeth Warren and Israel; Theodore Roosevelt; Emmett Till, Michael Brown - Ongoing Struggle for Racial Justice; Guns and the Southern Freedom Struggle; Texas School Text Books; Military Weaponry in Schools - WTF?; Socialism, Worker Cooperatives; Today in History; Abraham Lincoln Brigade celebrations

Fifty years ago, Ella Baker said, "Until the killing of black men, black mothers' sons, becomes as important to the rest of the country as the killing of a white mother's sons, we who believe in freedom cannot rest." Michael Brown's murder by a Ferguson, Missouri, cop has, once again, provoked a national conversation about how far the United States has come in its quest for racial equality.

The number of police department reviews the Justice Department has initiated under Holder for possible constitutional violations is twice that of any of his predecessors. At least 34 other departments are under investigation for alleged civil rights violations.

Reader Comments - "I Question America" -- Remembering Fannie Lou Hamer; The Coming Race War Won't Be About Race; Ferguson - Politicians and AFL-CIO - Both Missing; Israelis in US: An Open Letter to American Jews on Gaza; Minnesota Home Health Care Workers Unionize; Ukraine and Neo-Nazis; Sanctions & the Dollar; Economic Democracy Project's first event: Economic Democracy And The Struggle For Black Independence - Sept. 3 - New York

The South, where 55 percent of America's black population lives, is increasingly looking like a different country. Fewer children can read; more adults have HIV; its residents suffer from the shortest life expectancies of any in the United States. Six of the eleven states that made up the former Confederacy are at the bottom. That deprivation tends to be concentrated in the parts of these states with disproportionately large African American populations.(long article)

Representatives Keith Ellison and John Lewis plan to introduce a bill Wednesday that would make labor organizing a basic freedom no different than freedom from racial discrimination. The legislation would amend the National Labor Relations Act to include protections found under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act to include labor organizing as a fundamental right.

Net Corp Buyoffs; Tennessee sticks it to Comcast; Canvas fingerprinting; How Israel does spin; Amazon eats the world; Margot Adler

Ruby and Ossie were extraordinarily generous and bold, lending their celebrity to a host of leftist causes and holding affiliations with a variety of groups including some associated with the demonized CP. They fought Joe McCarthy's anti-communist witch-hunt and supported its victims, organized to restore Paul Robeson's passport, rallied for the Rosenbergs, and Che Guevara. While the media celebrates her life as an actress, they don't acknowledge the obstacles she faced.

Bob Moses remembers; Southerners reflect; Passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964; Voter suppression now; The Right vs. democracy; Throwback: How Mississippi Burning defamed the movement

50 years after the murder of my brother, Andrew Goodman, voter rights still threatened.