Portside

Rosa Parks was a lifelong activist who had been challenging white supremacy for decades before she became the famous catalyst for the Montgomery bus boycott. We see a woman who, from her youth, didn't hesitate to indict the system of oppression around her. As she once wrote, "I talked and talked of everything I know about the white man's inhuman treatment of the Negro." Today we honor her, as part of African American History Month.

Reader Comments: The Bernie Generation, and Bernie and After, and Hillary; Clinton's Attack on Reconstruction; Backlash to Corbyn and Sanders; Flint, Racism, African Americans and the Criminal Governor Snyder; The Syrian Peace Talks; Announcements: Building on Bernie: What Comes Next; Migrant Labor in China: A Post-Socialist Transformation; #BlackLivesMatter - Books on Black Liberation

Chicago Police Department officers stashed microphones in their squad car glove boxes. They pulled out batteries. Microphone antennas got busted or went missing. And sometimes, dashcam systems didn’t have any microphones at all, DNAinfo Chicago has learned. Police officials last month blamed the absence of audio in 80 percent of dashcam videos on officer error and “intentional destruction.”

"Despite substantial changes since the end of the enforcement of Jim Crow and the fight for civil rights, ideology ensuring the domination of one group over another continues to negatively impact the civil, political, economic, social, cultural, and environmental rights of African Americans today,"

Monday night, Hillary Clinton butchered Reconstruction's history. It's a good opportunity to correct the record, and glean why Lincoln really was America's greatest president. Reconstruction in reality was a briefly successful attempt to build a true democracy in the South. Clinton implies that it was Southern anger at unjust Reconstruction policy that led them to institute Jim Crow, but Jim Crow was the goal from the very end of the war.

Reader Comments: Noam Chomsky Says GOP Is Serious Danger To Human Survival; Trump, His Father and Woody Guthrie; Environmental Racism and Flint; Threat of a Free Haiti; Segregation in Schooling - Today; Contingent (Adjunct) Higher Education Faculty;

In the American Black community, during the years leading up to the Harlem Renaissance, there was a sense of building artistic expression. Outlets and avenues for its poets, musicians, novelists, artists, and actors were few. But in 1918, as the first great World War concluded and thousands of African-American soldiers returned home victorious, this mountain of artistic expression was now ready to explode.

The Trumps retained Roy Cohn, who two decades earlier had been a top aide to Sen. Joseph McCarthy during his infamous effort to root out communists in government. Cohn portrayed the Trumps as the victims and counter-sued the government, demanding it pay them $100 million for falsely accusing them of discrimination . . . Goldweber, the Justice lawyer who originally argued the case, said it was a clear government victory. That’s not how Donald Trump considered it.

The Haitian Revolution sowed fear in the hearts of Cuba's slaveholding class. In Freedom's Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution, historian Ada Ferrer undertakes a comprehensive evaluation of the impact made by the Haitian Revolution on Cuba, then still a Spanish colony located only fifty miles from Haiti's western sea borders.