DeRay Mckesson, Social Justice Activist, Is Keynote Speaker We are registered and all kinds of psyched for the 10th annual Rising Tide conference—“the premier annual new media conference in the GulfSouth”—to be held on Sat., Aug. 29, at Xavier University in New...
civil rights
Honoring Rev. King, Recommending “Selma”
* “Our whole campaign in Alabama has been centered around the right to vote. In focusing the attention of the nation and the world today on the flagrant denial of the right to vote, we are exposing the very origin, the root cause, of racial segregation in the...
Mississippi’s Runoff and Memories of Freedom Summer
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” —William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (1950) * On the night of the Mississippi GOP primary runoff between U.S. senator Thad Cochran and state senator Chris McDaniel, PBS aired Freedom Summer, a powerful American Experience...
Marching on Washington for Economic and Social Justice
* “Timid supplication for justice will not solve the problem. We have got to confront the power structure massively.” —Martin Luther King Jr. “If all the discriminatory laws in the United States were immediately repealed, race would still remain as one of the most pressing moral and political problems in the nation. . . . […]
“Nineteen Sixty-Three Is Not an End But a Beginning . . .”
* Another Sweltering Summer of Legitimate Discontent In this disheartening summer that has seen the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act of 1965—because, the chief justice tells us, its protections are no longer needed—amid vigorous rollbacks of voting rights and access in states with Republican-controlled legislatures; and that has seen a shockingly unjust […]
Read All About the 1963 March on Washington
Recommended Reading about a Movement Still Moving While we’re working on a longer piece about the great March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom of August 28, 1963, we’d like to point you to some writings about the event that we think are worth spending some time...
A Return to Literacy Tests? Take This.
How Many White Folks Does It Take to Pass a Jim Crow ‘Brain-Teaser’? With the Supreme Court’s June 25 decision in Shelby County v. Holder overturning Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and with Republican Jim Crow re-enactors “free at last” to get their electoral racism on, will the United States see a return […]
Supreme Conservatives Drag U.S. Ceaselessly into the (Jim Crow) Past
* “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” —Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, dissenting opinion, Shelby County v. Holder Re-Legalizing Electoral Racism; Red State Republicans ‘Free at Last’ June 25, 2013, will […]
In Honor of Medgar Evers and Res Publica
Conservatives’ rejection of all things “public” as “white flight” “The gifts of God . . . should be enjoyed by all citizens in Mississippi.” —Medgar Evers (1925–1963) * Fifty years ago today, Medgar Wylie Evers was killed in his driveway in Jackson, Mississippi, after returning from an NAACP meeting at a nearby church. Evers, a graduate […]
Todd Gitlin on Port Huron Statement’s 50th Anniversary
Early ’60s idealism: The mimeographed mission statement of a new generation [ Part 1 of a 2-part series | also @ DailyKos ] “The genius of the Port Huron Statement, as it was structured, was placing its declaration of values up front. The movement would not be guided...
How the World Has—and Has Not—Changed in 50 Years
* Portraits of Courage, Struggle, and Defiance This is the mug shot of Joan Trumpauer, a 19-year-old Duke University student and SNCC member who was arrested by the Jackson, Mississippi, police with eight other activists as they arrived on a train from New Orleans to...