Portside

Even as slavery was being abolished in the North, it continued to flourish, since the slave system was not confined simply to below the Mason-Dixon Line. The financing of the slave trade’s illegitimate commerce was sited heavily in Manhattan.

Reader Comments: No One is Above the Law; Climate Briefing; Fast Food Workers; Affordable Housing - New York's Coops; John Sweeney; Black Panther Party; Jazz and Race; International symposium - Rosa Luxemburg; Working-Class New York Revisited; more.

The failure of Hudson Yards should be both an object lesson and an opportunity. Grotesque hyper-luxury, with taxpayer subsidy no less, has had its day. Let’s build for regular people. Hudson Yards could be a monument to what was, and could still be.

Race and class after Trump, and more reports on the shifting consensus

Reader Comments: Biden First 100 Days; What Kind of COVID Stimulus; Unions and Green New Deal; Who Gets Social Security; Wear a Mask; Antisemitism; Jeremy Corbyn Affair; Refusing to Serve in Israeli Army; Intifada 33rd anniversary; lots of resources;

While his views may not fit squarely in a democratic socialist framework, Dinkins’s praise of a “gorgeous mosaic” of different races, ethnicities, religions, sexual orientations, living and working together does.

Lots of unanswered questions and quirky shifts as we move into a crisis-ridden era

This book is written by a nurse in the center of the pandemic. Accompanied by beautiful drawings of hospital workers in PPE caring for patients by Anna Usacheva, this is a narrative which helps us understand both COVID19 and the workers who faced it

James Campbell worked in the civil rights movement with Jack O’Dell, Bayard Rustin, Malcolm X and Bob Moses; in the theater and contributed to the influential Freedomways journal co-founded by W.E.B. and Shirley Graham Du Bois. Now at 95, a tribute.

Austerity policy-making over the past 50 years has been racialized, withering services in public agencies ranging from K-12 schooling to hospitals to higher education. Matters of race must be made more visible, placed at the center of policy-making.