John Lewis declares that, during the 1960s, he was arrested “a few times.” Then the elder statesman and éminence grise of the civil rights movement pauses before correcting himself in front of the large Dallas crowd he’s addressing: “40 times…"
Baker was a strategist, organizer and mother to the movement whose political acumen, humble leadership style and razor sharp political insights were legendary.
We are in a time when there is a tremendous sense of movement for a more just nation and world. The question that has to be answered if this protest movement is not to be marginalized is this: “What are the people power vehicles we are building?"
June marks the 55th anniversary of the Freedom Summer, when more than 700 college students - whose average age was 21 - traveled mostly from the North to Mississippi to work with local Black-led organizations to support their civil rights work.
February 1 marked the 59th anniversary of the start of the Greensboro sit-ins, a protest started in 1960 by four college students against racial segregation in Greensboro, North Carolina. Their actions quickly spurred a nationwide movement.
Our concern at this moment is with our moderate brothers and sisters who voice support for the cause of racial justice but simultaneously cling to paralyzingly unrealistic standards when it comes to what protest should look like.
The convention's keynote address was delivered by noted sociologist, historian, civil rights activist and author W.E.B. Du Bois. Titled "Behold the Land," the speech was one of the last major orations by Du Bois, who was 78 at the time. It remains timely today with its calls to unite blacks and working-class whites.
The reason for today's powerful and persistent insistence that Black lives matter is based on the irrefutable evidence throughout American history that Black lives have never mattered. Black lives that were enslaved for 250 years never much mattered beyond the kind of economic concern held for livestock. Black lives that suffered a hundred years of brutal segregation and discrimination following slavery's abolition never mattered until Black people raised their voices...
I celebrate Radical Reconstruction, a brief moment of glory, no matter how blindly and halfheartedly we, as a nation, did it. Did Reconstruction end racism? No. Does that make it a failure? No again. Considering it a failure is like considering the civil rights movement a failure because it only abolished segregation and not racism.
The Freedom Rides originated with a woman. Her name was Irene Morgan, and she was a 27-year-old wartime factory worker and mother of two traveling from Virginia to her home town of Baltimore on a July morning in 1944. Morgan, recovering from a miscarriage and unable to stand for any significant period of time, was sitting in the colored section of a Greyhound bus. At some point, she and her seatmate were asked to give up their seats to a white couple. She refused...
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