Portside

Reader Comments: GOP Health Plan = Death Squads; Trump Tax Plan - More for the Rich; It Could Have Been Me (protests then and now); Locked Up for Being Poor; Politics of Questioning the Civil War (and the end of Slavery); Time to Save Net Neutrality; Announcements: Building Bridges Across the Generation Gap: Shared Struggles; Michelle Alexander and Susan Burton; Posters - Reclaim! Remain! Rebuild: Affordable Housing, Gentrification & Resistance; and more...

"Donald Trump's greatest threat to our society and to our democracy is not necessarily his authoritarianism, but his essential ignorance—of history, of policy, of political process, of the Constitution. Saying that if Jackson had been around we might not have had the Civil War is like saying that one strong, aggressive leader can shape, prevent, move history however he wishes. This is simply 5th grade understanding of history or worse." David Blight, Yale historian.

Historians Eric Foner and Matt Karp on the international ambitions of the US slaveholding class — and the abolitionist movement that brought them down.

No, Ben Carson, Slaves Weren't 'Immigrants'. The State That Beat Trump's Travel Ban Is Back in Court. The Dalai Lama: John Oliver. How Jails Extort the Poor | Salil Dudani. The Doomsday Clock, Explained.

The exploitation of Black convict labor by the penal system and industrialists was central to southern politics and economics of the era. It was a carefully crafted answer to Black progress during Reconstruction – highly visible and widely known.

In the light of the former British Prime Minister’s dismissal of reparations, activists must push the debate further by detailing what reparations should entail. Fundamental to a reparations program must be the fact that we transform the system of capitalism which slavery gave birth to. We must initiate a “trans-Atlantic dialogue on reparations, as well as creating progressive governments and leadership to push for a reparations program.”

Across the Americas, stories abound of enslaved peoples utilizing the small window of “a little restricted liberty” afforded by the Christmas season to escape bondage.