civil rights

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• SOURCE: NPR
  1/18/2023
  

  Maine Radio Station Apologies for Distorted Edit of King Speech

  The paper had for years run an abridged version of 1963 speech to the March on Washington—which excluded King's discussions of systemic racism and race-targeted remedies for discrimination—but faced intense criticism this year from readers concerned with the politicization of history. 

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• SOURCE: Substack
  1/18/2023
  

  Bemoaning Alabama's King-Lee Holiday Misses a Bigger Point

  by Kevin M. Levin

  While white Alabama still embraces the "lost cause" mythology embodied by Robert E. Lee, outrage about the holiday he shares with Martin Luther King, Jr. shouldn't blind the public to the ongoing struggle to change the commemorative landscape—in Montgomery and nationwide. 

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• SOURCE: Mississippi Free Press
  1/16/2023
  

  The Audacious Co-Optation of Dr. King

  "No serious person thinks Dr. King would not want us to interrogate how and why inequity became baked into our systems and how to fix those systems so they don’t keep replicating themselves."

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  1/15/2023
  

  Two Black GI's Deaths Show the Racism in the WWII Military

  Allen Leftridge and Frank Glenn were shot and killed by military police for asking a French Red Cross worker for donuts. The aftermath showed the administrative and bureaucratic racism of the military supported and protected individual prejudice in the ranks.

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• SOURCE: The New Republic
  1/16/2023
  

  Looking for King's Legacy? Try Guaranteed Income Programs

  Thanks in part to a push from Johnnie Tillmon of the National Welfare Rights Association, MLK championed abolishing poverty by guaranteeing a basic income. 

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• SOURCE: Natchez Democrat
  12/30/2022
  

  Stanley Nelson Lauded for Work Preserving Records of Violence Against Civil Rights Workers

  Nelson wrote two books on "cold cases" linked to Klan activity in Louisiana and Mississippi. 

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• SOURCE: Oxford American
  12/13/2022
  

  Exiting/In

  by Francesca T. Royster

  A family and community history in Black Nashville puts the rise of "Music Row" in the context of urban renewal projects that destroyed African American communities and institutions, and the unacknowledged Black presence in country music. 

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• SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
  12/18/2022
  

  How "Till" Stands out Among Civil Rights Films

  "Till" shows that it is no longer possible for a movie about the civil rights era to put historical Black characters in the shadow of white protagonists. 

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• SOURCE: Jacobin
  11/28/2022
  

  Beverly Gage: When J. Edgar Hoover Tried to Destroy the Left, Liberals Helped Him

  by Michael Brenes

  Liberals enamored of Hoover's performance professionalism and efficiency, plus his fervent anticommunism, allowed many powerful liberals to remain on board with the repression his FBI unleashed against the political left. 

• 
• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  11/9/2022
  

  The Gay Movement that Grew in the 1920s Didn't Collapse, it Went Underground

  Henry Gerber's Society for Human Rights complicates the narrative of a gay rights struggle emerging publicly in the 1950s. If gay and lesbian Americans were organizing in the 1920s, what happened in the decades between? Jim Elledge's book seeks to explain that gap. 

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• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  11/2/2022
  

  New Documentary uses Fight for Black Power in Lowndes County, Alabama as Lens on Present

  Vann Newkirk, whose work inspired "Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power" examines how a conservative white minority fought to keep power even after the passage of the Voting Rights Act

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  11/2/2022
  

  Can a History of America's First Two Reconstructions Make a Third one Possible?

  Peniel Joseph's book looks to the past struggles to define and achieve freedom and equality to ask what America's Third Reconstruction – begun with Obama's election and attacked since– must do to survive and advance. 

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• SOURCE: Substack
  10/29/2022
  

  Michigan Gubernatorial Candidate Steeped in Disinformation About Parties' Roles

  by Heather Cox Richardson

  Focusing on the tension between hierarchy and equality rather than party affiliation helps to clarify why a candidate of the "Party of Lincoln" can make white power rants on public media. 

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• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  10/19/2022
  

  Don't Pit Rosa Parks Against Claudette Colvin – Recognize the Movement Both Shared In

  by Jeanne Theoharis and Say Burgin

  Multiple myths about Rosa Parks – that she was a reluctant and accidental crusader, or that she usurped the leadership of the younger Claudette Colvin – obscure the grassroots movement in Montgomery and the intergenerational mentorship the two women shared. 

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• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  10/13/2022
  

  Charles Sherrod: An Unheralded Giant of the Civil Rights Struggle

  by Ansley L. Quiros

  "Charles Sherrod is the most important civil rights figure you've never heard of"--fighting for six decades in southwest Georgia, persevering through incremental gains after the publicity of the Albany Movement faded. 

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• SOURCE: Black Perspectives
  10/13/2022
  

  How Pauli Murray Masterminded Brown v. Board of Education

  by Tejai Beulah Howard

  Overcoming marginalization by male classmates, Pauli Murray made a bet with a professor that segregation could be challenged by arguing that separate was inherently unequal. Murray collected on the bet only after the 1954 ruling validated the argument, but was long denied credit. 

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• SOURCE: Black Perspectives
  10/7/2022
  

  Fannie Lou Hamer and the Meaning of Freedom in Contemporary America

  by Keisha N. Blain

  Keisha Blain responds to a round table forum on her new biography of the Mississippi freedom activist, whose thinking and leadership in the movement can inform struggles for justice today. 

• 
• SOURCE: Washington Post
  10/2/2022
  

  Libraries Do Face Attacks, but Not Like the "Freedom Libraries" of 1964

  As yet, public attacks on libraries over programming and books dealing with racism and LGBTQ issues have not escalated to the routine firebombing of the libraries founded by activist groups during the "Freedom Summer" to help Black Mississippians access books and political information. 

• 
• SOURCE: NPR
  9/27/2022
  

  Law Professor Unearths Murder Cases from Jim Crow Era

  Margaret Burnham has been appointed by President Biden to a five-person Civil Rights Cold Case Review Board to increase public access to records of unsolved racially motivated crimes. 

• 
• SOURCE: Reason
  10/3/2022
  

  Will Biden Finally Pardon Callie House?

  Callie House led an organization that sought pensions as a form of reparation and relief for formerly enslaved people. In 1917 unfriendly federal officials prosecuted her for mail fraud for circulating her organization's materials.