Though I am gone, I urge you to answer the highest calling of your heart and stand up for what you truly believe. Emmett Till was my George Floyd. He was my Rayshard Brooks, Sandra Bland and Breonna Taylor. He was 14 when he was killed, I was only 15
Two American heroes died Friday. The most well known was Rep. John Lewis, 80. The other was the Rev. Cordell Tindell “C.T.” Vivian, at 95. The lesser known part of his work — his years in Chicago — that changed the fate of the city and the nation.
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...
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