Most Americans now grasp that violence was essential to the functioning of slavery, but a new book excavates the lesser known brutality of everyday Black life in the Jim Crow South.
Today, on Presidents’ Day, we rightly celebrate Abraham Lincoln for helping end slavery. But we shouldn’t forget the unstoppable force that also brought down the Slave Power: the several million slaves who left the plantation, many of whom joined the Union Army.
From Karl Marx to Eugene Debs to 1930s American Communists, leftists have regarded Lincoln as a prolabor hero who played a crucial role in vanquishing chattel slavery. We should celebrate him today as part of the great radical democratic tradition.
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The government of Guam has appointed a Commission on Decolonization, but U.S. control means that all of the island’s options, including the status quo, have substantial downsides.
John H. Bracey Jr.—an architect of Black studies—who helped to create one of the nation’s first doctoral programs in African American studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, died over the weekend. Bracey was 81.
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