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Black History

Mamie Till And Tarsha Jackson: ‘Mothers At The Gate’

July 1, 2016 Ebony Slaughter-Johnson, www.equalvoiceforfamilies.org
By Ebony Slaughter-Johnson for Equal Voice - In the summer of 1955, Mamie Till lived what could be described as a classic American life in the predominantly African-American South Side of Chicago. She lived with her son Emmett, who was 14 years old at the time. Family had always been important to Till, and she hoped to use the summer to reconnect with relatives in Nebraska. She wanted Emmett to join her, but he insisted on visiting his cousins in his mother’s native Mississippi. Till relented and saw her son off on a train to Mississippi.

What Happened To The Civil Rights Movement After 1965?

June 17, 2016 Adam Sanchez, www.zinnedproject.org , ,
By Adam Sanchez for Zinn Education Project - Fifty years ago this week, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee chairperson Stokely Carmichael made the famous call for “Black Power.” Carmichael’s speech came in the midst of the “March Against Fear,” a walk from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi, to encourage African Americans to use their newly won right to vote. But while almost every middle and high school student learns about the Civil Rights Movement, they rarely learn about this march—or the related struggles that continued long after the Voting Rights Act.

Muhammad Ali Risked It All When He Opposed The Vietnam War

June 6, 2016 Justin Block, www.huffingtonpost.com , ,
By Justin Block for The Huffington Post - Muhammad Ali’s most famous act of social activism — one that would strip him of his best fighting years, cost him millions of dollars, forever alter his image and eventually send him into debt — began with one off-hand quote: “Man, I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.” It was March 1966, and the U.S. military was escalating its fight in Vietnam. It began substantially lowering its standards for the draft so it could conscript more men, and call up men with lower IQs for 1-A service.

U.N. Calls Out U.S. For Lack Of Reparations To African-American

March 21, 2016 Salim Muwakkil, www.inthesetimes.com , , ,
By Salim Muwakkil for In These Times - The contemporary discussion on reparations for African Americans was instigated by Ta-Nehisi Coates in an award-winning essay in the June 2014 issue of The Atlantic. Reparations were also the most salient recommendation of a United Nations working group that recently toured the United States to assess the condition of black America. At the end of its fact-finding mission, the group concluded it was “extremely concerned about the human rights situation of African Americans.”

At 15 She Desegregated A High School, At 73 She Is Doing It Again

March 17, 2016 Rebecca Klein, www.huffingtonpost.com , , ,
By Rebecca Klein for The Huffington Post - When Dorothy Counts-Scoggins showed up for her first day of high school almost 60 years ago, she didn't even make it into the building before she was spat on, targeted with thrown trash and told to "go back to Africa." She was 15 years old that day in 1957 and the first black student to attend Harding High, a previously all-white school in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Police Beating That Opened America’s Eyes To Jim Crow’s Brutality

March 15, 2016 Staff, www.theconversation.com , , ,
By Staff of The Conversation - On the evening of February 12, 1946, Isaac Woodard, a 26-year-old black Army veteran, boarded a bus in Augusta, Georgia. Earlier that day, he’d been honorably discharged, and he was heading to Winnsboro, South Carolina to reunite with his wife. The bus driver made a stop en route. When Woodard asked if he had time to use the bathroom, the driver cursed loudly at him. Woodard would later admit in a deposition that he cursed back.

Surveillance Of Blackness From The Slave Trade To Today

March 7, 2016 Claudia Garcia-Rojas, www.truth-out.org , , ,
By Claudia Garcia-Rojas for Truthout - Mobilizations around Black Lives Matter have revived attention around surveillance of Black organizers and communities by the police and state institutions. The intensification of surveillance calls up comparisons to the civil rights era, when government surveillance programs, such as Cointelpro, were established to infiltrate, surveil and target leading movement organizers. Yet, as Simone Browne, a professor in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, demonstrates in her new book Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness...

Criteria Of Negro Art

February 29, 2016 W.E.B. DuBois, www.redwedgemagazine.com , ,
By W.E.B. DuBois for Red Wedge Magazine - "Black Art Matters." If there were a way to sum up the thrust of this essay in one very brief sentence then that would be it. W.E.B. DuBois is one of those thinkers who needs very little introduction: lifelong socialist and Black liberationist, founder of the N.A.A.C.P., author of what is still to this day one of the definitive books on Black Reconstruction in the south. What is often overlooked is how central art was to DuBois' ideas about Black freedom in the United States.

50 Years Later Black Panther Political Prisoners Still Fighting

February 23, 2016 Asha Bandele, www.huffingtonpost.com , , ,
By Asha Bandele for The Huffington Post - It's early on the Monday morning, post-snowmaggedon 2016, and I have an unexpected 10 minutes to spare. I know I should close my eyes, center myself for the day ahead, but instead I FaceTime Baba Sekou Odinga. I don't really have anything to say. Mostly I just pick on him, tell bad jokes, make faces, sing off-key. "Why you do that to that man," the homie Everton who has been navigating me through the storm all weekend, asks, laughing.

Abby Martin Speaks To Cornel West About Black Radical Tradition

February 16, 2016 AbMartin, www.telesurtv.ne , ,
By Abby Martin for Tele Sur - Abby Martin explores the legacy of the Black radical tradition today in the latest episode of teleSUR's The Empire Files. Prominent radical social critic Cornel West said that Black History Month honors an anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, internationalist tradition that fights for a truth that “is always to allow the suffering to speak no matter who is suffering.”

Newsletter – Celebrate Black Power

February 13, 2016 Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers, www.popularresistance.org , , , , , , , , , ,
By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers for Popular Resistance. This month is Black History Month, first celebrated as Black History Week in 1926 as a result of the efforts of African-American historian, Carter Godwin Woodson. Goodwin picked a week in February because both Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglas were born on February 12 and 14, even though he believed that people needed to be educated about the multitude of African Americans who have contributed to history, as change comes from the bottom up. In recent years black history is being made by multitudes of people. Under the umbrella of Black Lives Matter multiple organizations have been created across the country and tens of thousands of people have taken action. Black history is alive as history is being created in our times. Let's celebrate it together.

How The US Came To Recognize Black History Month

February 13, 2016 Daryl Michael Scott, zinnedproject.org , , ,
By Daryl Michael Scott for the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. More importantly, Woodson believed that history was made by the people, not simply or primarily by great men.He envisioned the study and celebration of the Negro as a race, not simply as the producers of a great man. And Lincoln, however great, had not freed the slaves—the Union Army, including hundreds of thousands of Black soldiers and sailors, had done that. Rather than focusing on two men, the Black community, he believed, should focus on the countless Black men and women who had contributed to the advance of human civilization. Woodson never viewed Black history as a one-week affair. He pressed for schools to use Negro History Week to demonstrate what students learned all year. In the same vein, he established a Black studies extension program to reach adults throughout the year. It was in this sense that Blacks would learn of their past on a daily basis that he looked forward to the time when an annual celebration would no longer be necessary.

Earliest Memoir By Black Inmate Reveals Legacy Of Mass Incarceration

February 3, 2016 Matthew Shaer, www.smithsonianmag.com , , ,
By Matthew Shaer for Smithsonian - In the fall of 2009, an unusual package arrived at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, at Yale University. Inside was a leather-bound journal and two packets of loose-leaf paper, some bearing the stamp of the same Berkshire mill that once produced Herman Melville’s favorite writing stock. Joined together under the title The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict, the documents told the story of an African-American boy named “Rob Reed,” who grew up in Rochester, New York, and had been convicted, in 1833, while still a child, of arson.

How We Misunderstand The History Of Black Protest

January 19, 2016 Juliet Hooker, www.truth-out.org , , , ,
By Juliet Hooker for Truthout - As the Obama era draws to a close, Black protest has resurfaced in a decisive way with the Black Lives Matter movement (BLM), which burst into national consciousness with the protests in Ferguson following the killing of Michael Brown in 2014. Yet many commentators have criticized the Black Lives Matter movement for failing to emulate the nonviolent tactics and reconciliatory politics that supposedly characterized the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
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