American slavery happened – we are still living with its consequences. I believe we are finally ready to face it, learn about it and acknowledge its significance to American history.
Reparations promise us a monumental re-birthing of America. Like most births, this one will be painful. But the practice of reparations must continue until the world that slavery built is rolled up and a new order spread out in its place.
Reader Comments: Trump, Sessions, Pence, Impeachment - Readers Debate; Resistance Ballot Box Victories; Racism, Lynching, Slavery, Removal of Confederate Symbols; Israel; Palestine; Saudi Arabia; Puerto Rico; 2017 People’s Summit; New Resource to Protect Medicaid and Health Equity; Great News from Workers Independent News; and more...
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.
After Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson refers to African slaves as "immigrants," Trevor gives him a lesson in semantics.
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.
Forget that Donald Trump said something commendable about Frederick Douglass--perhaps a first for Trump--the autobiography of Douglass is a classic, and reading it again is a fit way to commemorate Black History Month. Washington Post book editor Ron Charles gives ample reason why.
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