By Michelle Alexander
For the past several years, I have spent virtually all my working hours writing about or speaking about the immorality, cruelty, racism, and insanity of our nation’s latest caste system: mass incarceration. On this Facebook page I have written and posted about little else. But as I pause today to reflect on the meaning and significance of the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington , I realize that my focus has been too narrow.
By Joe Madison
There was a lot of talk around the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington this weekend that Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream remains unrealized. The March, of course, was for jobs and freedom, and commentators and activists alike rightly noted that much work remains on both counts. The Supreme Court this summer struck the core of the Voting Rights Act, and the recent Trayvon Martin killing and legal battles surrounding New York City’s stop and frisk policies underscore just how prejudiced our criminal justice system continues to be.
In the 50 years since Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech,” fewer than half of Americans say the country has made substantial progress towards racial equality.
When I participated in the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, I was fortunate to witness an exquisite example of Dr. King’s oratory, but I did not then understand the full meaning of King’s concluding “I Have a Dream” speech. Only after his widow, Coretta Scott King, chose me to edit her late husband’s papers did I begin to appreciate Dr. King’s most famous speech in the broader context of his life and times. In cogent, metaphorically rich passages, his speech expressed the universal longing for freedom and justice.
By Sylvia A. Allegretto and Steven C. Pitts
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After months of hearings, Ghana’s Supreme Court justices will put to rest, this week, a challenge to the election of 2012, creating a possible scenario of bitter if not violent feuding between the two major parties.
By Makani Themba
As the nation celebrates the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, there is a strong temptation to get stuck in a kind of nostalgia for the good old days of a simpler civil rights movement; a movement without angry Black people, afros and shattered glass. And in that nostalgia, sweep under the rug that, although the civil rights movement helped all people live better lives, it was unabashedly a movement borne out of Black organizing traditions to improve the lives of Black people.
Tens of thousands of people gathered in the nation’s capital on Saturday to mark the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, originally held on August 28, 1963.
Today we spend the hour with 13-term Congressmember Rep. John Lewis of Georgia, one of the last surviving speakers from the historic 1963 March on Washington, D.C. — which took place 50 years ago this year.
by Dr. Boyce Watkins
The funny thing about so-called “black leadership” is that much of our perception of black public figures is controlled and managed by predominantly white media. Therefore, it is no coincidence that nearly every prominent black person who speaks firmly for the rights of African Americans has been typecast as either a buffoon, a crook or a greedy, selfish liar.
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