“The Fifties,” by James R. Gaines, a former managing editor of Time, People and Life, reminds us that a trip in time to much of America then would resemble “The Handmaid’s Tale” more than “Ozzie and Harriet.”
My old friend Ray Smithhart would have loved the irony of union-fighting manufacturer Nissan making a gift of $100,000 to the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Institute. Known in his later years as the “dean of Mississippi’s labor organizers,” Smithhart worked closely with civil rights martyr Medgar Evers in the late 1950s and early 1960s, forging a link between the labor and civil rights movements that Martin Luther King Jr. himself saw as key to the future of both.
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