African-Americans

By Sharon Austin | – On Apr. 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, while assisting striking sanitation workers. Back then, over a half century ago, the wholesale racial integration required by the 1964 Civil Rights Act was just beginning to chip away at discrimination in education, jobs and public […]

African-Americans

James Baldwin’s Journey from Engagement with Israel to Pro-Palestinian Activism

Shalom Goldman

(Special to Informed Comment) – James Baldwin was one of the first African American writers to visit Israel. In the fall of 1961, he spent two weeks in Israel as a guest of the government. Baldwin was thirty-seven at the time, and already well-established as an essayist and novelist. He had published his first full-length […]

African-Americans

How Turkish Muslims at Atlantic Records Marketed Motown, Jazz, Black Music to America

Shalom Goldman

(Special to Informed Comment) – To those outside of the music business the title, “The House that Ahmet Built” might sound like the name of a Turkish folktale for children. But for those in the know, the ‘house’ was Atlantic Records and ‘Ahmet’ was Ahmet Ertegun, the great record company’s co-founder. In 1947 along with […]

African-Americans

The Fate of the Nation depends on Dems Turning out the Black Womens’ Vote

Yes! Magazine

By Tasha Williams | – ( Yes! Magazine ) – Turnouts demonstrate that when we are effectively engaged, our work can make seemingly impossible victories possible. A volunteer checks off voters as they arrive at the Beulah Baptist Church polling station in Montgomery, Alabama, on Dec. 12, 2017. Tasha Williams posted Nov 21, 2019 Democratic […]

African-Americans

No African-American has won Office in Mississippi in 129 Years– Here’s Why

The Conversation

By John A. Tures | – Mississippi is home to the highest percentage of African Americans of any state in the country. And yet, Mississippi hasn’t elected an African American candidate to statewide office since 1890. That’s 129 years. John Stuart Mill wrote about “the tyranny of the majority” – the idea that an electoral […]

African-Americans

Georgia Election shows that Dixie Tradition of Black Voter Suppression Flourishing

The Conversation

By Frederick Knight | – Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp has been sued for suppressing minority votes after an Associated Press investigation revealed a month before November’s midterm election that his office has not approved 53,000 voter registrations – most of them filed by African-Americans. Kemp, who is running for governor against Democrat […]

African-Americans

Aretha Franklin’s Reminder to Trump Era: Women, Minorities, Humans owed R E S P E C T (Video)

contributors

The Guardian: “Aretha Franklin, who has died at the age of 76, reflects on her 1967 cover hit Respect in a collection of archive clips. The queen of soul discusses how she and her sister injected Otis Redding’s song with their own twist and its subsequent use as a ‘battle cry’ and ‘women’s anthem’ 1. […]

African-Americans

Police Killings of African-Americans exact Mental Health Toll: The Lancet

AFP

The disproportionately high rate at which unarmed black people die at the hands of police has an impact on the mental health of black Americans

African-Americans

Increasingly Ludicrous WH denial that Austin bombings were “terrorism”

Juan Cole

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – Update: The suspect in the central Texas bombings is dead, after he detonated a bomb in his car on being surrounded by police, and was shot. Two more package bombs were found in Austin and San Antonio Fedex offices on Tuesday, giving evidence of originating with […]