Historian Bennett Parten's new book, Somewhere Toward Freedom, focuses on the experience of those who seized a chance at emancipation. “Through the collective weight and power of their movement, [they] found a way to essentially be in the room.”
U.S. history is not a steady march toward greater equality, democracy and individual rights, these liberal values compete with an alternative set of illiberal values that hold that citizenship should be limited by race, ethnicity, gender and class.
What was the Civil War about? In a word, slavery. The driving force in American politics in the decades after the American Revolution was the rise of an arrogant, ruthless, parasitic oligarchy in the South, built on God-ordained economic inequality.
The former South Carolina governor instead said it was a dispute over how ‘government was going to run.’
U.S. to World Court: Drop Dead! (in 1983). ACT UP shuts down FDA (1988). Secrecy runs amuck (1973). Stars and stripes fly over Dixie (1863). GIs strike against Vietnam War (1968). SCOTUS prefers civil wrongs (1883). Athletes protest racism (1968).
The nation is now divided between people who want a multiracial democracy in which every American is allowed and encouraged to vote, and those who yearn for an anti-democratic system in which an extreme white minority has unchecked control over everyone else.
Rather than celebrate this milestone of multiracial democracy, our leaders conspicuously ignore the occasion
At the close of the Civil War, people recently freed from slavery in Charleston honored fallen Union soldiers. A battered U.S. was faced with the task of burying and honoring the 600,000 to 800,000 Union and Confederate soldiers who had died.
Racial justice forces need to win governing power within the current system and then continue to build the strength to dismantle the racist state and replace it with an antiracist one: fight against the white republic and for antiracist democracy.
The violent right’s influence in intelligence, police, conservatism - and how to fight it
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