The dominant and distorted scholarship framed Reconstruction as an illegitimate enterprise that failed to sustain multiracial democracy. For much of the 20th century, this bogus history was used to justify denying Black people full citizenship.
Given the political realities and economic imperatives at play, free prison labor will persist in America for the foreseeable future, leaving in serious doubt the idea of American freedom – and abundant evidence of modern-day convict slavery.
Perhaps foreshadowing the confirmation battle we’ll see in the coming months, the right has already dismissed the idea of a Black woman justice of the Supreme Court.
It was not the failures, but the victories of PUSH that taught Jackson the most crucial of political truths: No amount of private successes could transform a public system working against the interests of poor and working people.
“Any analysis of race that artificially divorces it from class & racial capitalism leads us once again down a dead-end path of a little bit more for some but nothing for most of us.” - Barbara Ransby
The Vice President has constitutional rights, too. By a quirk of history, the plot against America is now also a plot against a Black woman’s right to vote.
We need to address the needs of students—and parents, and teachers. One size does not fit all, and race complicates the challenge.
“Negroes have benefited from a limited change that was emotionally satisfying but materially deficient... Jobs are harder to create than voting rolls.”
A group of attorneys and advocates have pledged to seek clemency for 110 Black soldiers who were convicted in a mutiny and riots at a military camp in Houston in 1917.
The Civil Rights Movement did have its shortcomings, it did not fail because we successfully carried the torch a significant distance down Freedom Road. Now, we hand off to the next generation, and all the generations of freedom fighters to come.
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