Where can African Americans find this lost golden age? Do we discover it during the first centuries of the Republic when slavery was the law of the land? Do we fast forward to the Red Summer, Jim Crow laws, “strange fruit” hanging from poplar trees?
Reader Comments: Hollywood Strike to Limit AI is for You and Me - We Are All Extras; DeSantis Using State Guard as Private Army; Negro League, Baseball Integration, the Left; Hollywood Labor Films; War on Women - Russia Says Give Birth Early;
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.
The Roberts two-step. He takes racism, a system of subjugation and social control, and removes the racists. What’s left is the mark of racism - race. A landmark case about the legitimacy of race hierarchy becomes, the use of race in school placement.
In the 1940s, a series of books tried to use the conventions of detective fiction to expose the degree of prejudice in postwar America. Their books — along with Sinatra’s song and film; Richard Wright’s memoir, coincided with a surge of activism.
"What old men know is that everything can change. What old men know, too, is that all that is gained can be lost. Lost just as the liberation that the Civil War and Emancipation brought was squandered after Reconstruction..."
During the Great Depression, St Louis’s Funsten Nut Factory was racially divided. Black workers, mostly women, worked harder and made less than their white counterparts. So they went on strike — and got their white coworkers to join them on the picket line.
Reader Comments: Clarence Thomas Lived Large Thanks to Nazi Worshipper; GOP Expels Black Representatives for ‘Representing While Black; Ukraine War, NATO; Bill Fletcher Jr.'s new crime novel; Celebrate The Legacy of Charlene Mitchell;
Reader Comments: Bank Failures, Deregulation and Fed-Raising Interest Rates; Illegal Invasion of Iraq; Slash Pentagon Budget; Jim Crow South; New Day for UAW; Light Communication; Letters From Langston; US Policy and Taiwan; How Workers Win
Most Americans now grasp that violence was essential to the functioning of slavery, but a new book excavates the lesser known brutality of everyday Black life in the Jim Crow South.
Spread the word