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How Vietnam Inflamed the Civil Rights Movement

Brent Staples The New York Times
In the first years of the war, it was more than coincidental that the frontline fighters were disproportionately Black. Still, the Pentagon was willing to tolerate Black soldiers only inasmuch as they forswore cultural expressions of Blackness.

Tidbits-Jan. 22- Reader Comments: Greenland; Minnesota; How Did MLK Jr. Become a Socialist?; Mutual Aid for Minneapolis-Where To Donate; Solidarity With Minneapolis – March on ICE Profiteers; Jewish Labor Bund, Hidden History of Jewish Anti-Zionism

Portside
Reader Comments: Greenland; Minnesota; How Did MLK Jr. Become a Socialist?; Mutual Aid for Minneapolis - Where to Donate; Solidarity with Minneapolis - March on ICE Profiteers; Jewish Labor Bund and the Hidden History of Jewish Anti-zionism; Cartoons

labor

How Did MLK Jr. Become a Socialist?

Eric Blanc Labor Politics
A forgotten network of radicals helped teach King how to organize—and how to link civil rights to economic redistribution for all.

The Imminent Death of the Voting Rights Act

Linda Greenhouse The New York Times
White people are depicted as victims of discrimination;.white South Africans are invited as refugees; the president demands a museum designed to tell the African American story must tell a happy tale. The voting rights law may not see a 61st birthday

The Rev. James M. Lawson Jr., 1928–2024

Peter Dreier The Nation
The “greatest teacher of nonviolence in America” was a mentor to generations of activists, from Martin Luther King Jr. to today’s union organizers and immigrant rights campaigners.

Martin Luther King – a Video Selection 1954 – 1968

Portside
Martin Luther King's speeches from 1954's Montgomery Bus Boycott to the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Strike. Compiled by Abdul Alkalimat, Prof Emeritus Dept of African American Studies and School of Information Sciences, Univ of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

The Civil Rights Movement Was Filled to the Brim With Leftists

Matthew F. Nichter interviewed by Shawn Gude Jacobin
August 28th was the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington. Ignore the lies and distortions — the reality, as the latest research shows, is that scores of socialists influenced or were themselves key figures in the civil rights movement.

books

Martin Luther King Understood Solidarity

Michael K. Honey Jacobin
Jonathan Eig’s new Martin Luther King biography stirs exhilaration and visceral pain at the unexpected triumphs and vicious violence that he and the freedom movement endured. It largely leaves out a key piece of King’s legacy: his commitment to labor
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