Skip to content

Civil Rights

Thoughts About The Greatness of Selma, Unity, And King

January 16, 2015 Alan Gilbert, www.democratic-individuality.blogspot.com , , , ,
The movie “Selma,” directed by Ava DuVernay, is a subtle, restrained account of a period of the most extreme American violence against black people, focused on the leadership and struggles of Martin and Coretta King as well as the many who joined them in Selma and around the country. The experience DuVernay conjures, for instance, the horrific shooting of Jimmie Lee Jackson in a restaurant in Selma, his father’s grieving at the coroner’s office, Jimmie’s body seen through the glass and King’s compassion, is alive today in the movement Black Lives Matter! about the murders of Eric Garner and Tamir Rice and Mike Brown and Trayvon Martin... The director sought to capture many people from the civil rights movement.

Release Government Files On Malcolm X Assassination

January 14, 2015 Boston Globe, www.bostonglobe.com , ,
AS THE 50th anniversary of Malcolm X’s assassination nears next month, questions around his killing still linger. That’s why the Department of Justice should heed an online petition to release all the federal files surrounding the civil rights leader’s death. A small group has launched a modest yet compelling grassroots effort to get a fuller picture of the half-century-old case, and its call for full transparency should be honored. On Feb. 21, 1965, the 39-year-old black former Nation of Islam minister, who had left the group and formed his own religious organization, was gunned down inside the Audubon Ballroom in New York City. While three Nation of Islam members were convicted of the murder, speculation around the real motive remains, and some question whether the real assassin is still at large.

The Real History Of Selma

January 3, 2015 Emilye Crosby, www.teachingforchange.org , ,
On this 50th anniversary year of the Selma-to-Montgomery March and the Voting Rights Act it helped inspire, national attention is centered on the iconic images of “Bloody Sunday,” the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the interracial marchers, and President Lyndon Johnson signing the Voting Rights Act. This version of history, emphasizing a top-down narrative and isolated events, reinforces the master narrative which civil rights activists describe as, “Rosa sat down, Martin stood up, and the white folks came South to save the day.” Today, issues of racial equity and voting rights are front and center in the lives of young people. There is much they can learn from an accurate telling of the Selma (Dallas County) voting rights campaign and the larger Civil Rights Movement. We owe it to students on this anniversary to share the history that can help equip them to carry on the struggle today.

Keep Marching On

January 3, 2015 Bill Fletcher Jr., www.jacobinmag.com , , ,
But this anomalous (if egregious) violence against police officers cannot be used to stop a nonviolent movement. The Haymarket Massacre is still the paradigmatic case of the state using a violent act to justify repression. In 1886, at the height of the movement for an eight-hour workday, a bomb was set off at a worker rally in Chicago’s Haymarket Square. The rally was called to both protest police killings of worker protesters and to support striking workers fighting for the eight-hour day. When police attacked the demonstration, a bomb was thrown. To this day no one knows who set off the explosive, including whether it was an agent provocateur or an activist. What is known, however, is that the government used the bombing as a pretext to discredit the protests and the workers movement, suggesting that the entire movement was comprised of supposedly violent anarchists.

Little-Known Civil Rights Statute In Police Shootings

December 30, 2014 Paul Lewis, www.theguardian.com , , ,
The review was launched after the Milwaukee district attorney announced that Christopher Manney – the police officer who shot Hamilton, and who has since been fired – will not face charges. In all four cases, federal officials are considering whether there is sufficient evidence to bring charges under a section of the US code that prohibits public officials from depriving an individual of constitutional rights under “color of law”. The DOJ did not respond to questions about whether there were any additional police shooting cases from 2014 – aside from those relating to the deaths of Brown, Garner, Crawford III and Hamilton – that are currently subject to departmental review or investigation.

Time Person Of The Year Runner-Up: Ferguson Protesters

December 27, 2014 Alex Altman, www.time.com , , , , , ,
Activists are putting some hope in Washington: the Department of Justice hasopened separate civil rights probes into the Ferguson police force and Garner’s death. In Ferguson, voter-registration drives are under way ahead of April’s city council elections. And the struggle has spread. On Dec. 3, after protesting the Garner grand jury decision at the federal courthouse in downtown St. Louis, Elzie glanced down at her phone. It was lighting up with tweets and texts tracking the night’s arrests, as well as updates from the demonstrations in New York. Like many in Ferguson, she was heading there the next day to join them.

5 Big Myths About ‘Next Generation’ Civil Rights & Open Internet

December 16, 2014 Malkia A. Cyril, www.huffingtonpost.com , , , , ,
As Black communities emerge from the shadows of criminalization, hashtags like#BlackLivesMatter have jumped off the computer screen and into the street. Beyond sparking a long-awaited new civil rights movement, they are also catalyzing an amazing 21st century model for civil rights activism. But the ability of Black communities to use the Internet to sustain this growing movement is threatened. Last year, a D.C. circuit court struck down network neutrality rules. The court told the FCC, the agency that regulates the Internet, that the only way to legally prevent discrimination online and enforce the net neutrality rules that make the Internet such a powerful tool, is to reclassify broadband as common carrier service -- a public utility, like electricity or water.

Bad Ass Teachers: Investigate Civil Rights Abuses In Education

December 9, 2014 Badass Teachers, www.badassteachers.blogspot.com , ,
Dear Secretary Duncan and Mr. Kim: This open letter is a respectful request to convene a national committee to investigate civil rights abuses that have reached a crisis point. While we commend you for meeting with BATs, Save Our Schools, United Opt Out, Journey for Justice, among other educational activist groups (and hope that you have read the Journey for Justice report entitled "Death by a Thousand Cuts”), we are requesting a follow up process that will result in action regarding disturbing trends we have observed with regards to civil rights violations of both students and teachers. As a national group of nearly 53,000 educators, we have collected the following observations as areas of concern. . .

Civil Rights Movement Came Out Of A Moment Like This

December 7, 2014 Dani McClain, www.thenation.com , ,
Back in August, some observers drew comparisons between the shooting of Michael Brown by Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, and the 1955 murder of Emmett Till. If parallels to civil rights movement history are helpful now, then let yesterday’s announcement that a Staten Island grand jury won’t indict the police officer who choked Eric Garner to death be a sign that we’re somewhere closer to 1963—when a series of devastating setbacks and subsequent widespread outrage transformed the civil rights struggle—than we are to Till’s lynching, that earlier consciousness-raising moment. There was a perfect storm this week: the continuing fallout of the failed indictment of Wilson; the news of the outcome in the Garner case; a Cleveland newspaper’s efforts to discredit and sling mud on the parents of a 12-year-old boy killed by police. This moment has the potential to catapult change

FCC, Deliver The Internet We Deserve

November 29, 2014 Center For Media Justice, www.freepress.net , , , ,
We brought this delegation of civil rights leaders to Washington, D.C., to remind Commissioner Clyburn that the communities that will be most adversely affected by weak Net Neutrality rules are communities of color. Presente shared how vital an open Internet has been in pushing the immigration debate forward and empowering President Obama to issue last week’s executive order. For ColorOfChange, an organization that grew from one email in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to the largest online community of African Americans, the Internet has allowed it to stake out a powerful political voice. The evidence of this power is unfolding in Ferguson as we speak. We delivered the message that strong Net Neutrality 1) ensures companies are not allowed to discriminate against voices online, 2) bans fast lanes and slow lanes, and 3) provides equal protections for the 60 percent of Latinos and 43 percent of African Americans who access the Internet primarily through their cellphones.

Civil Rights Groups’ False Split Over Net Neutrality

November 22, 2014 Brian Fung, www.washingtonpost.com , , ,
The heated debate in Washington over a critical policy measure that could shape the future of the Internet has created a peculiar split among traditional allies. A number of civil rights organizations and diversity groups overwhelmingly back a proposal that would lightly regulate telecom providers and broadband companies. But other groups representing minorities as well as consumer advocates and other public interest groups want to make sure that Internet service providers are regulated closely to be sure they don't slow down the traffic speeds of Web sites they don't like. The strange juxtaposition can be plainly observed in the letters sent by these groups to the Federal Communications Commission, which is responsible for establishing the new so-called "net neutrality" policy.

Lawyers Descend On Ferguson Ahead Of Grand Jury Decision

November 22, 2014 Tim Reid, www.dailymail.co.uk , ,
Hundreds of civil rights lawyers from across America are descending on Ferguson, Missouri as police and protesters prepare for a grand jury decision on whether to charge the officer who killed an unarmed black teenager in August. The attorneys are arriving in Ferguson as talks between protest groups and police have stalled over a refusal by officials to rule out the use of riot gear, tear gas and militarized equipment if demonstrations turn violent should a grand jury decide not to indict police officer Darren Wilson, protest leaders say.

Fifty Years Ago: A Turning Point In Civil Rights

November 12, 2014 Ted Morgan, www.truth-out.org , ,
In many circles, 1968 is seen as the crucial turning point in which the spread of tumultuous uprisings around the world not only wrought significant social change, but also helped to generate a backlash that ushered in the neoliberal era that currently dominates the globe. I would argue, however, that the seeds for that transformation were planted via the historic events occurring in 1964. First, 1964 saw a critical shift beginning to take place in the civil rights movement. Passage of the Civil Rights Act was, of course, of great historic significance, as was the following year's passage of the Voting Rights Act. Together, the two pieces of legislation began to dismantle the southern system of apartheid, bringing to fruition a decade of civil rights struggle.

After Ferguson, From Civil Rights To Human Rights

October 11, 2014 Nathan Schneider, www.wagingnonviolence.org , ,
A rebellion can’t last forever. But in the weeks since the killing of Michael Brown, the people of Ferguson, Mo., have been keeping it up for the rest of us. Now is when vision matters most — a vision or visions that can carry people from the moment to momentum, within which a movement can mature and grow and win. That’s why we should be discussing proposals like Forward from Ferguson, a new report by Max Rameau, M Adams and Rob Robinson — all veterans of the influential housing-justice group Take Back the Land, now working as the Center for Pan-African Development. The document, drawing on utterances of Malcolm X, calls for the U.S. racial justice movement to turn from the framework of civil rights to human rights. This is Malcolm speaking: We need to expand the civil-rights struggle to a higher level — to the level of human rights.

How Did Gandhi Win?

October 10, 2014 Mark Engler and Paul Engler, www.wagingnonviolence.org , , ,
For those who seek to understand today’s social movements, and those who wish to amplify them, questions about how to evaluate a campaign’s success and when it is appropriate to declare victory remain as relevant as ever. To them, Gandhi’s may still have something useful and unexpected to say. That the Salt March might at once be considered a pivotal advance for the cause of Indian independence and a botched campaign that produced little tangible result seems to be a puzzling paradox. But even stranger is the fact that such a result is not unique in the world of social movements. Martin Luther King Jr.’s landmark 1963 campaign in Birmingham, Ala., had similarly incongruous outcomes: On the one hand, it generated a settlement that fell far short of desegregating the city, a deal which disappointed local activists who wanted more than just minor changes at a few downtown stores; at the same time, Birmingham is regarded as one of the key drives of the civil rights movement, doing perhaps more than any other campaign to push toward the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964.
«12345678910»
assetto corsa mods

Urgent End Of Year Fundraising Campaign

Online donations are back! Keep independent media alive. 

Due to the attacks on our fiscal sponsor, we were unable to raise funds online for nearly two years.  As the bills pile up, your help is needed now to cover the monthly costs of operating Popular Resistance.

Donate Here

Urgent End Of Year Fundraising Campaign

Online donations are back! 

Keep independent media alive. 

Due to the attacks on our fiscal sponsor, we were unable to raise funds online for nearly two years.  As the bills pile up, your help is needed now to cover the monthly costs of operating Popular Resistance.

Donate Here
Sign Up To Our Daily Digest

Independent media outlets are being suppressed and dropped by corporations like Google, Facebook and Twitter. Sign up for our daily email digest before it’s too late so you don’t miss the latest movement news.