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

Why MLK would have Launched Nonviolent Disobedience to pass the Freedom to Vote Act

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Everything that the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., struggled for is at risk in today’s America, where one of the two major parties has succumbed to the deadly disease of Trumpism, which is built on white grievance. As the Republican Party has become more and more inflected by white nationalism, […]

African-Americans

How the Vietnam War pushed MLK to embrace global justice, not only civil rights at home

The Conversation

By Anthony Siracusa | – On July 2, 1964, Martin Luther King Jr. stood behind President Lyndon Baines Johnson as the Texan signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Although not the first civil rights bill passed by Congress, it was the most comprehensive. King called the law’s passage “a great moment … […]

African-Americans

Why we Really need King’s “Testament of Hope” right about Now

OtherWords

By Dedrick Asante-Muhammad | – ( Otherwords.org ) – 2022 has begun with melancholy, as our country sees the pandemic reach new heights. Meanwhile our crises of climate, democracy, and inequality seem more entrenched than ever. All this uncertainty is taking a toll, but uncertain times are far from unprecedented. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. […]

African-Americans

Sidney Poitier – Hollywood’s first Black leading man reflected the civil rights movement on screen

The Conversation

By Aram Goudsouzian | – In the summer of 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. introduced the keynote speaker for the 10th-anniversary convention banquet of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Their guest, he said, was his “soul brother.” “He has carved for himself an imperishable niche in the annals of our nation’s history,” King told the […]

African-Americans

Asians, other Minorities fear Attacks because of Race, Survey finds

Cronkite News Arizona PBS

By Breanna Isbell | – ( Cronkite News ) – PHOENIX – One in four Asian households in the U.S. report fearing physical attacks and threats because of their race, according to a recent survey by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The survey, taken Aug. 2 […]

African-Americans

bell hooks will never Leave Us – She lives on through the Truth of her Words

The Conversation

By Karsonya Wise Whitehead | – I was introduced to the work of bell hooks for the first time when I was 14 years old, sitting on my Nana’s porch, complaining about the mosquitoes and the heat. My Nana, who was probably frustrated by my endless complaints about being bored, stuck a copy of “Ain’t […]

African-Americans

How Government Policy created the New Urban Black-White Segregation and Failing Inner Cities

H. Patricia Hynes

Greenfield, Mass. (Special to Informed Comment) – For many years, I worked in Boston public housing with teams of residents, community organizations, public housing staff and other professors on reducing and removing the many asthma triggers that caused the highest rates of asthma and asthma attacks in the city. Living and working in the heart […]

African-Americans

Lincoln’s Invention of Thanksgiving was all About how Black Lives Matter

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Thanksgiving Day, as is well known, was an invented tradition arising from the Civil War, promoted by Abraham Lincoln and his successors as a myth to unite the divided country. It doesn’t actually go back to the Pilgrims. There had been many Thanksgiving Days in the nineteenth century, at a […]