June marks the 55th anniversary of the Freedom Summer, when more than 700 college students - whose average age was 21 - traveled mostly from the North to Mississippi to work with local Black-led organizations to support their civil rights work.
Sister Addie Wyatt said, “If you don’t know where you come from, you don’t know where you’re going.” This is where we come from. I fervently hope it is not where we’re going.
Skokie and the Nazis - there were massive counter-demonstrations, black and Jewish solidarity, Holocaust survivors who vowed to confront the Nazis in the streets, and a grassroots of proud, leftist Jews.This untold history offers lessons for today.
In The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition, Linda Gordon emphasizes broad patterns, making the book more timely than even the headlines of white nationalist outpourings the past months would suggest, writes Scott McLemee. What stands out in Gordon’s book is that the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s tried to create a world unto itself through spectacle, mass communications and branding.
This new book reminds us of the scope and power of the second incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan, beginning a century ago. As reviewer Scott McLemee points out, however, to only point out the Klan's racist heritage can be deceptively simplistic. McLemee reminds us that what made the Klan a mass force in the 1920s was that the movement's reactionary politics and racist passions "were widespread enough to count as mainstream.'
Numerous colleges and universities in the last decade have studied and acknowledged the role of slavery in building and running their campuses, or financing the institutions. Other colleges have changed the names of buildings that honored people with ties to the Ku Klux Klan.
Today, the N.A.A.C.P. carries the weight of history and burden of bureaucracy. But it does not seem willing to shed blood, literally, or in terms of the uncomfortable work that characterizes effective activism.
With Donald Trump and his ‘America first’ rhetoric, these groups are seeing a dramatic surge. It’s up to us to stop them
Trump's strategy and campaign is to appeal to majority white, working class voters who have economic anxiety and fear of demographic change. Trump's candidacy viewed in the context of historical continuity - nativism is a primary political discourse in American history. Trump has shown us that it is just as powerful now as in the 1850s or the 1920s. Indeed, "Make America Great Again" recalls the 1920s Ku Klux Klan's appeal for "100% Americanism."
In 1970, the United States Post Office Department issued a 6 cent stamp to commemorate the Stone Mountain Memorial. Ken Lawrence summarizes the historical and political background of the memorial and suggests that the stamp was veiled gift to Southern advocates of white supremacy.
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