Portside

A movement for liberation requires long-term commitment. It requires truth-telling and courage and patience. And a movement should celebrate moving the needle, as Mississippians did.

On a May morning in 1920, a train pulled into town on the Kentucky–West Virginia border. Its passengers included a small army of armed private security guards, who had been dispatched to evict the families of striking workers at a nearby coal mine.

The standoff in the deep South between a black working-class community and a global auto giant reflects a broader anti-Trump resistance emerging in the labor movement, fueled by frustration with the empty promises of neoliberal “development” policies.

Reeves’ injunction barred all “agents, officers, employees, and subsidiaries” of Mississippi from treating same-sex couples differently from opposite-sex couples. HB 1523 explicitly contravenes this order, granting circuit clerks the total freedom to turn away same-sex couples while continuing to license opposite-sex couples.

Politicians and local editorial writers love Howard Industries of Laurel, Miss. Politicians shower the producer of electrical transformers with money—taxpayers’ money--to the tune of at least $60 million in local and state subsidies so far, plus a $20 million bond issue from the county. The only thing politicians asked of company CEO Billy Howard was that he use the money to create more jobs. And there’s the rub. What kind of jobs?

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Here's an astonishing speech by U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves, one of just two African-Americans to have ever served as federal judges in Mississippi. He read it to three young white men before sentencing them for the death of a 48-year-old black man named James Craig Anderson in a parking lot in Jackson, Miss., in 2011. They were part of a group that beat Anderson and then killed him by running over his body with a truck, yelling "white power" as they drove off.